Pacemaker Fishing Forum

As anyone can imagine, the anticipation to this day was intense. Since I had a conference in Miami, I took advantage of it and took some vacation time.

Mike Sines and I met up with Capt. Mark Hall at 7:45am to do some urban fishing. Mike is a major in the Army stationed down in Doral. He is a helicopter pilot who did 2-3 tours over in the hot zone. Cool dude too!

I will post the pictures when I get home and they will show the urban nature but also the unique fishery that they have down there right in the city.

As I always mention, if you are in Miami, you should hire Mark. He gives you a great chance to catch some neat fish. Plus he is very reasonable and very knowledgeable....just a pleasure to fish with.

As soon as we hit the 1st spot, Mike hooked up with a feisty jack and the skunk was off.

We then proceed to work a lot of shoreline but only caught a few small LMB but we were picking them off here and there. We were using X-Rap type of shallow divers but after a bit we switched to a DOA 3" soft plastic minnow. That was the ticket and we started hooking up more often.

The weatherman had called for a sunny, warm, humid day with temps in the low 80s.

Well, we looked east around 10am and the blackness made us concerned. Then the winds picked up so we knew we were going to get dumped  on so we hurried under a bridge. Good decision as it rained for a bit but we still got wet because the bridge leaked in several places.

The storm moved out and we continued to catch many a bass (over 2 dozen at least but we were not counting, measuring or weighing). They turned on and we were just having a great time with them.

Our goal was to look for Peacocks but the sun only came out later in the afternoon. We did see a few but they were skittish. Most of the time they hang around and could care less that you are looking at them. I think we were a week or two early for the bedding pattern but we caught plenty of bass to keep us in the game. We spent that last couple of hours hunting them down but got no real shots at them.

Finally, at around 3 I told the guys that we really needed to call it a day. We didn't want to stop though. It was supposed to be a half day charter and we were way over our time. Plus, Mike needed to get home to his family.

We took a few more casts and on my last cast (fly rod) I hooked up with a bull. I was sure it was a peacock but when Mark saw the fish, he proclaimed it was a jaguar guapote. Basically, it looked like a black crappie on steroids. What a great fight on a fly rod!

We called it a day....satisfied and tired in a good way. We also agreed that we would schedule another trip down there as soon a s possible.

Here are the pics....