My Fishing Adventures by Christopher Sprague, Jr. Angler-Team Tuppens, Contributing Writer
Hello Anglers,
Recently, I fished The West Palm Beach Fishing Club KDW. This is a huge tournament that gives out tons of prizes. There were over 230 boats this year! We attempted to get some bait the day before. We went out to the Palm Beach Inlet buoys and spotted some runners and speedos. I put a piece of bonito on a small hook and my Dad was jigging. I caught a few runners on the single hook and my Dad dropped a Sabiki and came up with 3 at a time. We got around 12 runners which we thought was plenty, so we headed in. The next day we started unloading all the reels into the boat and realized our bait wells weren’t working. Luckily our bait was in a pen, so they didn’t die, but we still had trouble turning them on. We thought that seaweed got caught up in the pumps, so we reversed hard to try to get it out. We did that multiple times and finally the pumps turned on. We headed out of Palm Beach Inlet to our normal spot, Juno/Jupiter, where we knew there were a lot of fish. We caught a few small fish and continued to drift North. We caught many that were around 18 pounds but couldn’t find the big ones. Finally, we saw a dolphin jump behind our boat, eating our goggle eye. He jumped a few times, then let go of the bait, but then grabbed it again. Luckily, he didn’t run much and were able to gaff him and get him in the boat quick. It was around an 18 pound bull dolphin. We were excited and continued fishing. We caught about 20 kingfish and released most because we knew they weren’t going to do us any good because there was no aggregate. I even flew a kite for my first time. I put a goggle eye out, right on top of the water so you could see the tail splashing. It wasn’t long before we saw a kingfish fly. It was cool to watch because it jumped around 6 times trying to eat the bait. We released it because it was very small. We think it is unnecessary to kill fish that we know won’t win and we wouldn’t eat. Maybe, in a few years it might come back as a 60 pounder! Our big kingfish was 21 pounds and our dolphin was 18.4 pounds which tied for second, but the other boat weighed in before us, so we got 3rd. This was a very fun tournament and it was nice because we got some dinner.