By: Capt. Joel Brandenburg
Offshore winds mean inshore action. Even with our 53ft Hatteras, sometimes offshore wind and waves get so strong that we can’t justify putting our clients through 8 hours of roughness, so when the seas howl, we change it up and fish inshore.
March Mahi starts to heat up this time of year. Birds start their daily migration, heading offshore in the morning hunting baitfish. Weed lines start lining up offshore. In the Middle Florida Keys, it’s common for offshore anglers and captains to head out to the Marathon Humps targeting Black Fin Tuna and also hitting deep drop spots in and around the Humps for Snowy Grouper, Golden Tilefish, Queen Snapper, Black Bellied Rosies, Wreckfish and Swordfish.
What happens this time of year is typically on the way out to the Humps you’ll find diving birds, organized weed lines and floating objects that make mahi habitat. VS the winter time where you’ll go out 25 miles to the Humps and not see a bird, a weed line or anything floating. Normally in the winter time you have to focus on color change and water temperature changes to find Mahi’s. Winter time Mahi catches are few and far between, but when the water starts to warm up Mahi come in closer to feed and breed. It’s one of the times of year that you have a good chance at a real slammer Mahi.
We like to troll and sight cast for Mahi. When trolling we look for birds, weed lines and floating objects. Whether we’re trolling under diving birds or paralleling weed lines or cutting past a floating object we like to troll at 6 knots. We troll with several different types of artificial baits, but our favorites are pink and root beer colored squid baits. We also like trolling rigged ballyhoo. Some people pre-rig fresh ballyhoo themselves, but we just buy our pre-rigged ballyhoo from the bait shop, because it saves us time and we’ve found as long as the pre-rigged package of ballyhoo is still vacuum sealed and not punctured, the ballyhoo swim well on the troll.
We like to use mono rather than wire, because we get more Mahi hits, but the tradeoff is using mono rather than wire takes you out of the wahoo game. We like to use single hooked rigs rather than double hooks. The double hooked rigs hinder the natural movement of the ballyhoo. We sight cast for Mahi one of two ways. The first way is the most common and popular. We leave the hooked mahi in water as a decoy and pitch our pilchards or cut bait at the surrounding Mahi. The other way we sight cast is with white jigs with white plastic bodies for Mahi is finding them suspended under a floating object or weed line.
— To fish with Captain Joel Brandenburg of Ana banana Fishing Co., call or text him at 305.395.4212 or 813.267.4401 or visit www.marathonfloridakeysfishingcharters.com or stop by at 11699 Overseas Hwy, Marathon, FL