I got another chance to go out with Ernesto and was delighted to see a repeat performance of the infamous fish dance. Ernesto's version sure seems to bring out the fish! Our day started at about 6 AM with a run to Dunkin Donuts. We were back and heading out towards the inlet by about 7ish. We tried getting some livies, but had no luck as usual. Our plan was actually to anchor out in about 70-ish feet and try to get some yellow tail, but we quickly got bored. We decided to head out and see if we could find any structure offshore. We didn't have any ballyhoo, but we decided to let out a couple of lines with Rattle Jets and another with a cedar plug. Right after letting out the second line, we got our first hookup. Ernesto brought the first Barracuda in shortly thereafter. Right as we were resetting, we get another hook-up. This one was much smaller... much smaller. It ended up being a black fin tuna that was about a foot long and it tried to swallow a 6" cedar plug. Even though it was the first tuna landed on the boat, I decided the tuna gods would look kindly on a release of the baby and a try at finding mom or dad.
We circled around for a while, but with no more success we headed further out. It was a beautiful fish, can't wait to catch a bigger one. At about 7 miles, we got our next almost simultaneous knock-downs with two dolphin on the lines. We had the usual fire drill walking around each other, but Ernesto's fish spit the hook. I brought in the other one pictured above. The only other knock-down was a smaller cuda that was released.
When it was time to clean the fish, I tried a new method. Pulling the skin off before removing the fillet is much better than trying to slice it off after the fillet is off of the carcass. I also took the fillets off of the barracuda, but didn't end up using them for fear of ciguatera toxin.
