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My wife Pam and I visited my son Corey and his girlfriend Misty in Jupiter over Thanksgiving. Corey recently moved to Charleston but Misty remains in Jupiter. It's a long distance relationship that seems to be working. During Corey's visit to Jupiter/Palm Beach, he was tasked to run his bosses 61' Gwaltney which had not been run for a while as both he and his boss have been in Charleston and the boat has been sitting in Palm Beach (for sale).
Tuff job, but someone has to do it and the fallout was I got to go fishing with my son.
The Gwaltney is the boat his boss had before he purchased the 71' Jim Smith that Corey was running at the time, and he hired Corey to continue running his boats.
After a great Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, we slept in on Friday and got a good start at the crack of noon. With no time to catch live bait, we started dragging some dead ballyhoo around out front of Palm Beach inlet in 1'-2' seas. Corey found a couple bait pods on the bottom machine and kept doing figure eights around them. Bite started hot as we had a couple kingfish bites which were immediate cut-offs as we did not rig with any wire, then a big sail jumped on a bait rigged behind a pink and white softhead chugger. The sail was a big one and was grayhounding all over the ocean putting on quite a show. After a short tussle to get it to the boat, we saw it was foul hooked on the top of the head. After releasing this fish, the bite died and we did nothing but teach dead ballyhoo to swim, and clear weeds from the lines for several hours. At about 3:45, we decided to give it till 4:00 before calling it a day. At 3:55, a fish came up behind the left flat line. Andy, a friend of Corey's who was mateing for us picked up this line but the fish was gone. It dropped back to the right rigger line and I picked up that rod, but again the fish was gone. I dropped the bait back and felt the pick-up. After a short drop-back, I came tight on the fish but it was a struggle to keep up as the little fish was hot and swam at the boat. It was on the leader in 2 minutes and was lit up and jumping all over. This was one of the prettiest sailfish I've ever caught. Pam took some pictures.The photos do not do it justice. She said the only thing she could see thru the viewfinder was "white water" so when she saw white, she pushed the shutter. Here's a couple of the better ones.
Not a bad day - Two fish on dead baits in 3-1/2 hours.
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Originally Posted by Reveille75
