Captain's corner

By RANDY ROCHELLE

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 6, 2000

The voice came over the radio: "If I hook up with one more sailfish, I'm calling it a day." There also were reports of blackfin tuna being caught. No, we weren't fishing off the east coast of Florida or in the Keys, we were fishing in a kingfish tournament out of St. Petersburg.

It seems that some of the tournament anglers in the deeper water were catching more sailfish and blackfin tuna than kingfish. You might be thinking this was a fluke, but every year around this time as the large schools of Spanish sardines and cigar minnows move through our area we get an influx of sailfish, blackfin tuna, kingfish, dolphin and sometimes wahoo. If you're going to be fishing offshore in the next couple of months, watch the surface for schools of bait. If you run across a school, use a gold hook bait rig to put a couple of dozen live sardines into the bait well.

There are a couple of ways to fish these baits. One is to slow-troll a spread of live bait over wrecks and ledges in 80 to 130 feet of water, areas such as the Peaks. The other is to put out a bag of chum and flat-line a couple of live baits down current while you're bottom fishing. If sailfish and tuna are what you are fishing for, use a mono leader. If you get cut off a couple of times, you may want to switch to a wire leader as there probably are kingfish or barracudas in the area. If you get lucky and catch a dolphin, leave him in the water and watch to see if more dolphin follow him to the boat. As long as you leave one fish hooked up near the boat the school will stay with him.

-- Randy Rochelle runs Islander Charters in St. Petersburg. Call (727) 528-1213.

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