Dara and I just returned from a week in Key West and Lighthouse Point, FL. We spent the first afternoon in KW fishing tarpon on the fly with our friend Capt. Rob Delph in his little Action Craft flats skiff. We ran out west by Woman Key and found a nice school of tarpon chasing a meatball in the shallows. I threw the fly on a bunch of tarpon but most were not interested until a worm hatch started going off. The worms are a type of tropical sea worm the tarpon go nuts for on the surface. We ended up catching 2 tarpon on worm flies using the 10wt fly rod. We had a double going and eventually released a 40 and 80lb class tarpon. My flyrod skills need work, but it was a blast pulling on a couple fish on the long rod.
  

Later in the week we fished with Captain Mike Delph in his beautiful new 35 Sea Hunter (carbon fiber hull, 50-plus knots), powered by a pair of 300 Mercury Verados. We originally planned to fish day time swords, but the weather was up and we were forced to drift live baits offshore for sails, marlin or whatever would bite. Dara released a sail, and we caught a load of big jacks, cuda, bonita, sharks and assorted KW bottom grabbers. I tried dropping my butterfly jigs on my Shimano Trevala/Trinidad combo and got beat up on every drop by big amberjack, almaco jack and other mystery biters.  Dara fought a huge amberjack on the butterfly, but pulled the hooks at the last minute.  I could not get the butterfly jig back to the boat without a bite! We love KW...

Friday morning we fished out of Islamorada with Captain Mark Johnson on his 24’ Lake-and-Bay bayboat. Mark ran us across Florida bay 40 miles to East Cape above Flamingo in the Everglades for some wide open light tackle action on snook, jacks, trout and huge sharks. Dara caught her first snook, trout and blacktip shark, and I caught a huge lemon shark and an assortment of jacks, snook and trout. The fishing in the ‘glades was very fun!
 


Friday night we ran back up to Lighthouse Point to stay with our friends, Burt and Susan Moss, who live there off the Intercoastal Waterway. Saturday afternoon Burt, Dara and I fished up in Palm Beach Inlet for giant snook with Captain Gary Borland. The snook were spawning in the inlet, so we were strictly in catch and release mode. We started fishing at 1pm when the tide started running out, and in 3 ½ hours we caught and released over 70 snook from 15 to 30lbs! This was one of the best afternoons of fishing I have ever seen anywhere! We were drifting with live grunts and threadfin with a 1-2oz. slider rig on 20lb trigger-sticks and were hooked up almost the whole time we fished. Triples and doubles were normal when we drifted through the zone, and the majority of these fish were 20lber’s. that fought like tigers! At the end of the tide we were out of bait, dripping with sweat, and tired of pulling (not really)! The amazing thing was we were the only boat fishing the spot for most of the tide, and Palm Beach inlet on a Saturday is like the 405 at rush hour! What an amazing fishery…




On Sunday morning Burt and I planned to run his 34 Sea Vee offshore to deep drop for swords, but the conditions were off and we deep dropped for rosy snapper instead. We caught a few and had a decent morning offshore.

We didn’t get to fish swords this time around, but the inshore fishing was great!

BTW- Our new 31' Contender Fisharound "Knock Down" is a week away from being finished.  Look for a complete update on the progress soon!