Key Largo 5.7.12 to 5.11.12

[cletus9000]

My girlfriend, brother, sister-in-law, and I spent a handful of days down in Key Largo this week and managed to get out fishing every day on our rented 26 ft center console. Weather was awesome, with us able to get offshore as much as we wanted and obviously making fishing the reef and back country easy. The offshore bite for us was slow - we went out the first afternoon and the first two mornings. On the first afternoon, we had a sailfish hit the rigger line twice, but couldn't get him to come tight. Both mornings we managed a few blackfin tuna off of Key Largo Hump, but never could get the Mahi to cooperate. I would classify the offshore fishing as quite slow given the time of year, but at least we managed some sushi. The third morning, we chummed the reef after hearing a good report from a neighbor. We hit Molasses reef, the island side given the outgoing current, and did OK with the yellowtail snapper, and kept a handful of keepers for dinner. I also managed one red grouper in deeper water while we were trying to get our anchor set in the right spot to get a good chum drift. Interestingly, by far the best bait while reef fishing was cut tuna belly from the offshore trips. We also got the usual barracuda attacks and bite offs and managed a few other reef denizens that I couldn't ID. The last morning, we did a very brief inshore trip. My brother had to be back at the dock by 9AM, so I headed to a creek mouth bayside with some live shrimp. After getting dialed in to where the fish were in the water column, we proceeded to nail a number of very nice sea trout along with some smaller mangrove snapper and a large lady fish that put on a great show with lots of acrobatic jumps. Live shrimp was the ticket. Here's the final tally of fish caught or missed: gotta love the variety of fish down there. Few pics follow that.

Caught:
- blackfin tuna
- yellowtail snapper
- red grouper
- few un-id'd reef fish
- barracuda
- speckled sea trout
- mangrove snapper
- lady fish
- pin fish
- pigfish

Almost caught:
- sailfish
- tarpon (jumped 4 in the creek behind the house)

A blackfin


Yellowtails that we kept (threw lots more back)


Turtles mating


They let us get really close