Florida Keys Day Three

Holy Mackeral we hit the motherload today! We left the dock just as the sun was peaking over the horizon and we headed out 15 miles into the gulf. Still a bit too rough to head out into the atlantic, but they will hopefully change one of these days soon.

Anyhow we filled the whole cooler up with fish at just two fishing spots. Flash forward to the end of our trip and here is open half of our full fish box:

Our first spot we caught sharks and jacks with every cast. Here is what they looked like:

Although they are alot of fun to catch, we didnt want to waste all of our bait there. We kept one of the blacktips to try out for dinner and then we headed 5 more miles to another wreck. Speaking of bait, we bought ourselves a pinfish trap at Captain Hooks Marina and Dive Shop and we caught 75 perfect sized pinfish overnight! We also catch pinfish for bait right from the dock and we keep them in this holding pen:


So at the second spot we started catching fish right away and we caught quite the mixed bag using various stuff for bait. We used live pinfish, cut sardines, live shrimp, cut blue runners, and casted gotcha mackeral lures. Here is a sample of each species we got from this same spot. This is a nice Mangrove Snapper caught on a sardine:

My sister Amy and her husband Jared showcasing some nice mackeral. We absolutely love to eat this beautiful fish, you just got to cut all the red meat out of them!

Justin with a black grouper that was just short of the legal size limit:

Tony with a HUGE cobia caught on a live pinfish! This fish was a beast and will be the focal point of Thanksgiving dinner. I am going to bake seafood stuffing into the big cobia fillets. Now that is an entre to celebrate with......adios turkey, not this year!

Dad with a nice keeper Gag Grouper

Here is a Florida Pompano that was another pleasant surprise to find at the wreck.

Amy and Jared showcasing the biggest of our monster mangrove snapper! We brought home 40 of these snappers, but these 4 were the biggest.

Here is our crew and boat returning from our voyage. The name of our boat is very fitting eh?


The kids absolutely love feeding the birds our leftover pinfish:


Here is dinner tonight. Hickory smoked barbecue blacktip shark wrap with banana peppers and shredded cheese! Out of this world good, we will be keeping sharks to eat more often now that we learned they are really great to eat! The key is to take out all of the guts and blood right after catching them and before putting them into the cooler.


Wednesday we are heading out lobster diving at Bahia Honda state park. We are hoping to compliment our Thanksgiving cobia and seafood stuffing with fresh lobsters!