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Hooking Up Anglers Since 2011.
April is one of the best months to chase sailfish in the Southeast Region. It’s on the tail end of the season as the main body of fish are pushing through, and you can do really well if you get the right conditions.
We like to start our day by catching live bait—threadfin herring, goggle-eyes, big pilchards and Spanish sardines are the main baits. We use Sabiki rigs to catch them and a dehooking tool to take them off the Sabiki rig, so that we never touch the baits or wipe scales or slime off of them. That keeps your baits healthy all day long.
When you reach into the livewell to pick out a bait, try to pick one bait, catch it in the net and take it out and hook it up. Don’t scoop up a bunch of baits, pick one and throw the rest back. Every time you net or handle the baits, you knock off some of the scales and weaken the bait. You want to have baits that try to get away from as sailfish when it swims up and incites the fish to strike, as opposed to a nearly dead bait that doesn’t seem natural to the sailfish.
Target the sailfish in anywhere from 80 to 300 feet of water, but don’t just stop anywhere and blindly fish, try to find some good conditions that put the chance that sailfish will be in the area in your favor. I like to look for good blue water with a northerly current, those are the two necessities for success. A color change or rip is another good indicator of where to start, and I like a northerly (northwest, north or northeast) wind, so if you get the north wind, north current and blue water, you have optimum sailfish conditions.
We like to kite fish, but you can also slow-troll the baits or power drift using your outriggers. When we’re kite fishing we use conventional tackle with reels able to hold 400 to 500 yards of 20 pound monofilament. I use 50 pound monofilament for the leaders, but fluorocarbon also works well, and we attach that to a 6/0 or 7/0 circle hook, depending on the size of the bait. We hook the baits through the back just in front of the dorsal fin for kite fishing. You can bridle them with a rubber band, dental floss or some of the cool rigs for bridling like the Jerry Rig that I often use.
We put out two kites with three baits each on them, and then also put out a pair of flat lines behind the boat. I like to use spinning rods for the flat lines and keep one bait close to the boat, which makes it easy to reel it in and cast to any sailfish you see surfing by the boat.
For your flat lines, drifting or slow-trolling, you want to hook the baits through the nose so they swim forward without any friction. If you hook them through the back, they’ll tend to spin, although you can hook them high on the back, just behind the head with some success.
Keep an eye open for free-jumping sailfish, which are sailfish that just jump out of the water nearby. When you see one, you want to go to it immediately, since you know there’s sailfish in that area. Most of the time sailfish are moving south, so you want to get a couple of hundred yards south of where you saw the sailfish jump, put out your baits and hopefully intersect that fish.
A lot of times it’ll be more than one fish that comes up into the bait, even if you only saw one fish jump. When you hook a fish, try to keep the rest of the baits in the water, which will give you the opportunity to hook-up with any other fish that might be traveling with the school.
The average sailfish is 40 to 50 pounds with an occasional fish of 60 pounds or larger. We let all our fish go.
This Fishing Report was submitted on 4/25/2014 4:10:26 PM by Seamus and last updated on 4/25/2014 4:10:26 PM.
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