Jimmy Hewes Two Day Trip

Jimmy Hewes has been fishing on the L&H longer than I have. He fished with John B. Dudas and his son John L. and has great stories about the old days. Jimmy booked the boat for two days, but could only fish one of them. The first day we started out kite fishing, but luck was not on our side. We had sailfish bites one after another, but they kept getting away. In a couple of hours we ended up going one out of six on sails and a couple nice kingfish. We needed to change things up so I decided to go look for the cobias. My brother Fred, my son James and I searched for the cobias over the white sand. After a while, Fred shouted "There, There!!!". It was a nice school of fish with a lot of good sized ones. Fred and James went to work on the cobias, but unfortunately some of the bad luck was still with us. We lost several nice fish, but in the end we were able to get the limit. Everyone was happy and after getting bait for tomorrows trip we made it an early day.

The following day was almost the complete opposite of the day before. With Jimmy Hewes on the boat we could do no wrong. Every sailfish that came up we hooked and landed. We got two singles, a triple and were fighting another when I saw a freejumper inshore and to the south of us. Fred raised the baits in the air and we moved to get in front of the sail. From the tower I could see the fish below the surface and there were several of them. By now the sail that was already hooked was several hundred yards out. When we were ahead of the pack of sails Fred dropped the baits down and within seconds there were sailfish on every bait. As soon as the baits hit the water one of the sails would rise up and eat it. Everything got hooked and we found ourselves fighting five sails instead of just one. It was an aggressive move to try and bait more fish while already hooked up, but it paid off big time! After a while we managed to release all of the fish, it was a great feeling! After that we moved out a little deeper and got a couple nice tunas. In the afternoon we fished by a shipwreck and got a nice black grouper that we released along with a big bull shark. It was a great two days of fishing and we made a lot of anglers very happy.