Raging Bull – By Ed Killer for Martin County
The warm currents of the Gulf Stream carry along with it a cornucopia of offshore seafood offerings. The most popular of those offerings, by far, is the fish known as the dolphin.
Make no mistake, this “dolphin” is not your friend Flipper, the amiable mammal and mascot of a pro football team in Miami. It is the fish which is commonly referred to on menus throughout the country as mahi mahi, the fish’s South Pacific name.
There are three reasons dolphin are hotly pursued by bluewater anglers in Florida and elsewhere: They are great table fare; they are beautifully colorful; and they are fantastically fun to catch with hook and line.
The month of April is the primary time to find them only a few miles offshore of Martin County along the edges and eddies of the Gulf Stream. Typically, the prevailing southeasterly winds mean that some of the Atlantic Ocean’s most thrilling dolphin action can be found swimming along in large schools within a 20-minute ride from the jetties of St. Lucie Inlet. Anglers will take along trolling baits like ballyhoo or small colorful lures to entice bites out of dolphin, but sometimes it helps to pick up a few live baits, too.
Charter boats, party boats and weekend warriors alike will be able to get in on the fun. Run and gun techniques are popular, too. That’s when anglers run their boats at high speeds looking for large floating objects, or even better, large mats of sargassum seaweed, which serve as hunting habitat for the pelagic dolphin.
There is one trick anglers use to put more than one dolphin into the fishbox. After hooking the first fish, do not remove it from the water. Leave it hooked and swimming in circles around the boat while the other anglers on board pitch cut baits, live baits or jigs to the remaining fish in the school.
Instantly, one dolphin on the rod will transform into five dolphin on five rods, and the Chinese fire drill of anglers fighting fish in the cockpit ensues.
The bright green and gold fish can be caught year-round in Martin County waters, but the spring run is thought of as the best action. It’s also when the large male dolphin, called bulls, are most commonly encountered. Each year anglers catch a few 50-pounders which inevitably result in fish tales of epic battles retold at area tiki bars and in local fishing reports. For two decades, the Florida record 70-plus pound bull dolphin was caught just north of Martin County. The present record 86-pounder was caught a little to the south, so the next record could be swimming by just waiting to be caught.
Catching a 50-pound bull dolphin is not like catching a 15-pound gaffer dolphin. The latter is fun and after a boat has enough to feed a family or two, it’s good to switch to catching something else. But the raging bull will crash through the bait spread, sometimes engulfing two or three baits at time, and will put on an aerial display of leaps and splashes that will be etched into one’s memory for years.
And the fish story it generates will be even better.
A HUGE THANK YOU to Ed Killer, Outdoors columnist with Treasure Coast Newspapers and the USA Today Network for providing the copy.