Summertime Doldrums, Cold Water Upwelling, and Summer Squalls
Fishing this past week has been hit and miss for the most part, with some awesome days followed by tough ones. The summer doldrums have arrived bringing flat calm conditions, but as quickly as catching exploded off of the beaches, the cold water Labradors current pushed in cooling the surface water to as low as 68 degrees.
On the 27th of July, I hade the privilege to once again fish with Kent Roberts from Orlando, and our goal was to add tarpon to Kent's list. We met at Port Canaveral before sunrise, and we headed south down the beach in search of bait. Bait this past week was tough to locate, and we finally found a good concentration near Patrick AFB. After acquiring some pogies, we quickly located a large school of jumbo jack crevalle, and Kent was soon hooked up to a 30 plus pound school bus. While Kent was doing battle with the jack, a huge tarpon slammed a bait on the flat line off of the poling platform. I quickly switched rods with Kent, and his skirmish with the jack turned into a full-fledged war with the 120 plus pound silver king. For the next hour and forty-five minutes Kent fought the fish only to lose it boat side due to leader failure.
On the 28th, I returned to the same area with my good friend Captain John Kumiski, and the tarpon were nowhere to be found, so we decided to slow troll live pogies, and the kingfish, bonito, and large jacks were going off in close to the beach in 20 feet of water.
Yesterday, I once again returned to the beach, but this time, the cold water had settled in, and we only caught one large jack. The fishing was so bad; we call the charter short, and canceled today.
Today, Captain John Kumiski and I switched gears, fishing the Banana River No-Motor-Zone from John's kayaks. Like the rest of the lagoon, the water levels were extremely low with heavy floating weed mat, and Captain John managed a slam on fly catching 3 redfish, 2 tarpon, and 1 nice sea trout.
