The seas were a little rougher this morning (Friday) with winds from the northeast at about 10-15 knots. We decided to exit Elizabeth Harbor from the south and troll into the wind and angle out for deeper water and look for birds, boards and weeds. When we fished with Pat on Wednesday we let him decide on the trolling spread. He looked through the skirted rigs we had been using and through the many other skirts we had on board and changed out a few. He wanted more black & red. He also picked up a couple blue & white skirts to use. He didn't like the Billy Baits at all and put rigged ballyhoo on all the rods. We didn't have any luck with his spread so were headed in towards a reef spot when we saw some birds working on what appeared to be Skipjacks. We put out a BB and caught the only trolling fish of the day, a nice size Skipjack Tuna that we wanted to use for bait. Pat wanted to keep it to eat. CJM and I decided this fishing day was going to be different. We put out a couple Billys and a couple of rigged hoos with one running on the wire deep. Almost immediately after getting set up we were in 2000 - 3000 feet of water and had a hit on the wire rig then a hookup on the other rigged hoo. By the way, it had an orange skirt which has been the most productive for us over the years in the Bahamas. Gary grabbed the rod and the fight was on. Shortly we landed a 15-20 pound Dolphin.
We got the lines back out and had another hit on the orange but the line broke. Not sure what happened, the drag was set right and we had new 60# line on. Must have been a nick in the line we didn't see. We got set again and another good hit and another equipment failure. This time the wire broke right at the swivel. It was one of Pat's haywire twists, not to point any fingers. We had a couple more good hits but no hook-ups so we continued out looking for that magical something. Nothing going on out there so we headed back in. When we reached that same 2000 - 3000 feet contour we hooked up again, this time a double. We were now trolling 2 orange rigged hoos and they were the target. Gary and Scott made short work of them and we had 3 nice fish in the box.
We had a couple more missed hits as we trolled in and it was getting near the end of the day. But, we had another hook up, again on the orange rig. Karen was up and with some help from GP we got a 4th fish in the box....all very nice Dolphin.
Jeannie's record is still intact but GP is getting in the groove and we are headed for Cat Island on Monday for some fertile fishing grounds, so who knows?
CTM
Good luck my friends
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