dolphin offshore canaveral

There’s never any consistency to mahi fishing. The gulf stream moves up to 6 mph. We were greeted with westerly winds and 2-3ft seas Monday morning. At around 200ft, the water turned from a 70° green to a 75° blue in about a mile. However, this temperature difference caused a moderate northerly wind in the stream. This collision with the current coming from the south caused a 3-4ft chop. We put out our spread of chin weighted ballyhoos with small skirts and started trolling.

Unfortunately, this color change was full of barracudas. We trolled another mile to 215ft where we found a bull mahi on scattered weeds. We trolled this area for another 90 minutes, but got nothing. We decided to take a break and try bottom fishing for amberjack. The wreck was full of the elusive red snapper and almost extinct sandbar sharks.

Some scattered weeds drifted up to our boat so we started trolling again. The wind was really picking up, so we went north along The Cones to make our ride in easier. We found two small mahis, but one got off.

We reeled up once we were way northeast of 8A. We tried a few drifts of 27FA and found more red snapper. It was getting late, so we decided to try for kings on 8A instead of weeding through the extinct ones for a cooler fish. It the hour we tried, we found false albacore and baby sea bass. Had we had more time and live bait, we may have caught the kings. We were ready, but no free-swimming cobia showed up.

There have been very few reds in the Brown Lagoon near North Merritt Island. The only place on the entire Indian River is the eastern shore between 528 and the NASA Causeway. The adjacent western shoreline and areas north and south of here have clean water right now, and there have been reds and trout on the flats. There isn’t much grass at all, but I’m encouraged to see that there are a few bull reds on the western shoreline of the Central Indian River and the South Banana River lagoons.

Due to persistent brown tide, I’d consider looking somewhere besides Sykes Creek, the North Banana River, and The IRL near North Merritt Island.

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