by Robin
This is not the know-it-all post that I'd like to make it but only a quick guide to what we were seeing this past month offshore.
When fishing for dolphin many times, we look for rips, weedlines, color changes and temperature breaks. This is considered surface structure, along with boards, palm frawns, floating junk on top of the water.
Many times, one of these surface phenomena happen when two bodies of water push together. And depending on the wind, anything on the surface of the water will get squished in the middle creating a line. THIS is important because little creatures like fish larva, shrimp and seahorses will be found in sargassum weeds or sea grasses. That attracts small baitfish, bar jacks, tripletail, triggers and other small tropical fish to the area. Then, THAT will attract the big game fish.
Some of our best days of spotting fish are when we see a nice line of weeds. We've found kingfish, dolphin & cobia underneath or swimming alongside them.
What do you do when you don't have one of those picturesque weedlines? You look for anything on the surface that will give you clues. Anything. You have to learn to read the water if you're going to go home with fish.
A couple weeks ago, we found "scum" in 125 ft of water. We picked up 2 dolphin off of it. We saw other dolphin swimming around, one chasing flying fish. It was an awesome thing to witness. This is also where I got my fantastic flying fish photo.
A week later, wind had changed direction, big seas had come and gone and we were left with very little signs on top of the water. We blind trolled in the morning until the fish told us where they were. Again, we picked up a couple dolphin, kinfish and barracuda this way. But, as we headed in and the seas laid down quite a bit, we saw this (below). This was the only surface structure we saw that day besides balloons. I am sick of seeing balloons all over our Atlantic Ocean. I wish cruise ships would stop handing out balloons to tourists because a good percentage of them end up in the ocean to get stuck in propellers.
Just above those purple arrows is a change of water color. I'm not sure if there was also a change in water temperature, but that may be too. We did not stop to fish it because we were headed in because of the storms, but this is another clue to trolling for dolphin or kingfish. Jack prefers to fish the west (shallower) side of these breaks. I'm sure each fisherman has their own preferance though.
I had tons of other photos of weeds & such but I thought I'd keep them to a minimum.
BUT, I had to add last week's photo of another flying fish that took off in front of us. These are skimmers still on the water, but many really do fly for well over 100 ft before smashing back into the water.
Happy Fishing!
Robin
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