Fins to the left. Fins to the right. And a 'phin in the box.

The way today's fishing trip started, I was originally going to title this post as "Bait Snobs".  Why?  Well, after having to wait again for the railroad bridge to open, we made it out to the bait site.  We found lots of bait alright, but it wasn't the right kind.  We kept pulling in horned bellies.  (They are silvery fish with a little fin on their bellies that are very sharp and can hurt!)  It got to the point where we wouldn't even bring the string of them in the boat.  We just took them off the hooks and dumped them back in the ocean.  I'm sure all the other boats around were thinking, "What are those people doing?  Why aren't they keeping those bait fish?  Those fish not good enough for them?"  Actually, why keep the bait if the fish you're going for won't eat them? 

So after trying our other bait spot, we had enough sardines and greenies in the livewell to start fishing.

We set up our drift and it wasn't too long before we got a bite.  We were pretty excited!  No splashing, but lots of zipping around.  When we got it to the boat it was a barracuda.  :(  Oh well.

As pointed out in earlier posts, when we have live bait, we attach balloons to the lines to 1 - keep track of the line/bait and 2 - keep the bait a little closer to the surface. 

Once we get everything out, we can just sit back and watch.  And today we got quite a few shows!

Seems like the bait we put out had some shark attractant on it.  It's pretty fun to watch the big fish chase the little bait fish up to the surface.  Sometimes you can't see the bait, but you can see the balloon zig and zag around and then the fin if it's a shark or flash of blue if it's a dolphin.

Our first shark was a small one.

Then we caught a dolphin that we thought was kind of small but turned out to be decent-sized.

Then more sharks!  There were a couple of them circling our baits and we could see they were hammerhead sharks.  One of them, who was about 8' long, finally snatched our bait and Frank spent quite a while fighting him.  It took quite a bit of the line.  But after working to get a lot of it back, Frank tightened the drag and line snapped at the clip.  (Ok, I would have liked to have gotten a picture of this huge shark, but given how big it was, it probably turned out to be a good thing I didn't.)

The weather was beautiful.  We found bait and caught fish!  (Some to keep and some to release.)

So now you understand the title to this post.  :)