My good buddy Gery Vaughn of Hunter's Haven Taxidermy and I met just before dawn and pulled my boat up to New River Marina. We launched around 6:30 and headed to the hot spot lately, Spanita Rock out of New River Inlet.
We deployed a pair of deep divers, a 3 5/8" model in pink and a clown colored 5 1/4" model. Not very long after deploying the lures we had a double hook-up! Gery and I each fought what tuned out to be a nice pair of Bonita! It's 7 am and we already have a pair of 7 pound fish in the boat We started sight casting and soon I hooked up another Bonito, this one ran like the dickens. Then almost ran as hard all the way back to the boat, I thought I had lost it for a minute. Then it decided to run off shore again. This went on for a while before I finally boated our third Bonita of the morning.
Fish were busting bait all around us. Not that many birds but a few. I turned off the engine and for the next 30 minutes we made casts to the fish busting the surface. NOTHING. We tried four or five different style lures - Maria Jigs, Diamond Jigs, Mirro-Lure glass minnows, Gotcha plus and a no name metal jig.
Then it was just like someone opened up the gate, Gery and I both had a fish on. This time we landed a pair of nice Spanish Mackerel. For the next 90 minutes neither one of use made a cast without hooking up with a fish. It was wild! We were catching Bonita and Spanish with an occasional blue. The only down side was the the blues were cutting off our lures, often while we had a fish on, sometimes right at the boat. Sadly we would watch the blue hit the line and our fish swim away with our lure as jewelry.
So we decided to go back to trolling with Yo-Zuri's. That was the ticket, no cutoffs but we kept putting fish in the boat!
We ended up catching over 60 fish between the two of us in less than 3 hours! At 10am we headed for the inlet. We brought home 6 Bonita and 20 Spanish Mackerel. The rest were released to fight another day.
Now came the best part. Driving home and stopping along the way at friends house to share some of our fish. We saw lots of smiles today, ours being the biggest!
