Amberjack Yesterday

Richie and Dylan Moore had never caught an amberjack and had been asking to be included on a trip for the past couple of years. Yesterday, we took them to the South Tower and they caught all the jacks that they could possibly want.

While we were catching jacks, we were listening to the offshore bite going on. Excellent gaffer dolphin everywhere, a scattered bite of yellowfin tuna, at least one bigeye tuna, some wahoo and white marlin and an excellent blue marlin fishery is going on. Several boats had caught a couple, one boat had released four. There was good fishing from the Norfolk Canyon on down to the Triple 0s.

What has become almost a tradition and was an exact repeat from last year; after watching the guys fight a dozen or so jacks, I came down from the bridge, picked out a croaker, and caught a single amberjack, and went back up to drive the boat for the rest of the day. Again, my one fish was the largest one caught.

After the guys were done trying to catch a jack as large as mine, we hit a wreck and caught a few keeper-size sea bass which we did not keep while continuing to listen to the offshore bite. We had not brought ballyhoo or our offshore stuff. I talked with Charles Southall and we figured that there had to be something on the boat we could troll. We scrounged around and put out some kind of spread. We ended up with a nice catch of dolphin to finish the day.