Played hooky today and my son John & I decided to do the father & son thing for the day. His desire was to stop a Pelican Flats and try to fish for kingfish first before proceeding on offshore for dolphin. Since pogies have been hit or miss lately and and the mullet are stacked in our canals I tossed up a net full of 8" to 12" mullet before leaving our canal. Since we had plenty of live bait and John remembered that on many occasions before the kingfish readily ate them I couldn't get him to even look for pogies very thoroughly.

We started at Pelican at 8:45 A.M. and had almost immediate results with John becoming very frustrated after pulling the hooks on 6 fish right out of the chute. I had a Palm Beach release myself. We finally got on track and caught our limit of four fish and proceeded offshore in search of the elusive dolphin. We set up in 240' of water east of PC and almost immediately lost a 10 pound schoolie on the way way back. We then proceeded to troll blindly on the westerly wind conditions (I personally don't like a west wind for dolphin fishing) amongst the scattered grass out to 600'. We finally hooked and caught a small 8# dolphin and decided to run in. You can see by the picture below that a west wind IS good for something, a picture of John taken offshore at 32 knots on the way home on a fabulous day. We got caught at the locks behind two fuel barges which cost us over a hour, which wasn't exactly what we would have wanted.