Robin's Reports

8/5/06 - It was a fluke. No flounder today. Bait & Sharks only

Sorry for the bad pun. I guess yesterday's catch was not to be duplicated. We found plenty of bait around Buoy #3 and 6. That was the easy part. The hard part was trying to stay close to the buoy and then still pick up a fish off the bottom. Regardless, nobody was home to eat the livies. Here is a picture of Port Canaveral buoy #3.





Again, the ocean was like a lake. The water was smooth as glass and it made for a beautiful ride wherever we went. The haze was pretty heavy today but not as bad as yesterday. Towards the eastern horizon, it was hard to tell where water ended and sky began.


Here I have two pictures of how to catch bait with a sabiki. There are 6 teeny, tiny hooks on this pole with a small sinker at the bottom. It really hurts to have one prick you.

You simply jig the pole up and down through the bait pod and then bring them up. Mostly, a good shake or two of the pole will land a lot of them on the floor of the boat. To the left is Jack performing the shake method. He has 2 small fish on. The boys thought bait-catching was the best part of the day. They love grabbing them up and putting them into the live well.

Last month, our pump for the livewell died and by a small miracle of God, we already had a brand new one in our supplies. Somebody gave it to Jack a year or two ago and we simply stowed it for such a time as this.

Here are some happy little campers. I will let you know that we released our remaining bait (which was a lot) after we were done fishing.

So, back to the fish story..... no flounder and so we headed to the 20 ft reef for some easy fun action for the boys. Lots of baby sharks. We put a livie (bait) on the hook either via the eye hook or the tail hooking. The purpose is to keep the fish alive and swimming to attract fish that would otherwise lose interest with dead bait.

In short, we had 2 sharks for big M, 2 sharks for Mom, 1 shark for lil M.

I'm not certain yet but we're thinking these are baby spinner sharks or a type of reef shark. Normally we see a lot of baby hammerheads but that wasn't the case today.

Captain Jack had his own ideas of how to attract a kingfish, barracuda or shark. He put a balloon at the top of a 5 ft wire leader that would suspend his baitfish off the bottom. We watched that balloon once move to the left. (resulting in skunking) It moved to the right slowly (half eaten bait). It even did it's best to head down to the bottom (another half eaten bait). Jack is pretty convinced it was the baby sharks finding their way to the top of the water column.
Can you see the yellow balloon?

See part 2 for bait identification.
Happy Fishing,
Robin