Today my half day fishing buddies were David Kingsley and his sons Mike, Dan, and Ron who are vacationing in Central Florida from Webster, N.Y. and enjoying the beautiful weather and the theme parks in Orlando. Today was to be my clients first offshore deep sea fishing trip and we departed with high hopes of fair winds, calm seas and a bountiful catch.
    The half day plan was to meet up at 7:00 AM, run up the Banana River and make the usual passage through Canaveral Locks. Since the cold water has moved back a quick check to see if any live bait was available confirmed that the plan today was to run far offshore in pursuit of Mahi-Mahi. After clearing the mouth of the inlet and running as far south on the beach as the famous Ron Jon's it was readily apparent that the pogies were again not going to be available with the water temp on the beach at 69 degrees.
    Turned the bow northeast to make the ride to the Gulf Stream a little more tolerable in the 2'-4' easterly seas, not so calm, but doable. We blew right over 8A reef on the way out and the cold nasty green water was still there so we stuck to our plan and didn't splash the baits until we were in 75.6 degree water 238' deep at 9:30 AM. We ended up trolling out to 385' and finally hit pay dirt when we found the flying fish and a few scattered weeds in 285' of water. We had a total of 9 Mahi hooked while we were fishing and managed to boat 5 of them for our efforts.
    While we were offshore I really enjoyed the opportunity to fish with them and we saw a Manta Ray in the Gulf Stream (no cobes), a turtle or two, and we were visited by a pod of bottle nosed dolphin for a while that came by to ride our bow wave for a few minutes. BTW, did I say I really had a great time fishing today with the Kingsley men?
     When we started our return to Port Canaveral at 1:00 PM we were 38 NM miles northeast of the port and with the easterly seas on our beam cruising home at 32 knots was a magic carpet ride aboard the Goin Off. We were back at my home in Cocoa Beach with our mission accomplished by 3:00 PM and I had them on their way back to their place in Orlando by 3:30 PM with a cooler full of Mahi for their evening fish dinner.

Final tally for the day:
5 Gaffer Mahi Mahi