As Charlie put the boat in neutral and I continued to move my fish closer to the boat, Charlie grabbed a spinning rod, one that had been pre-rigged with a double line a bare hook, and added a chunk of ballyhoo to the hook. He tossed it to the side of the boat and immediately hooked up.
He placed his spinning rod in a rod holder and in one swift, continuous motion gaffed my fish and dropped him in the fish box. As my fish banged around in the fish box, Charlie handed me a spinning rod and I followed his earlier lead and hooked up again. While I fought my second fish, Charlie boated his first and then hooked up again.
Dolphin are peculiar fish in one respect. They generally won’t leave a brother fish. If you keep a hooked fish in the water next to the boat, the entire school will usually remain around the boat.
We continued to double team fish in this manner for about fifteen minutes, boating about ten dolphin in the five to ten pound range. I could look beneath the boat at any point in time and see dolphin everywhere down to about a seventy-foot depth. The water was that clear.
And then, it was as if someone turned off a light switch. I looked over the side as I boated a fish and saw dolphin everywhere. Literally only seconds later, they had disappeared. As Charlie and I puzzled over the swift departure of fish, the reason for their departure came into view.
I have seen some big sharks in my day; I’ve even caught quite a few. But this bad boy was one of the biggest I had ever seen. A hammerhead that appeared to be as long as our twenty foot boat slowly swam beneath us. Then another one appeared, and before long we had an entire school of hammerheads at varying depths under the boat.
They were fascinating to watch, and as sharks go, appeared to be quite agile in the water. Their small eyes were placed one on each end of their hammer-shaped heads. I remembered the times that my father would catch a small one several times over and would, out of frustration, carve the two hammer appendages off like he was whittling a piece of wood, leaving a sightless bleeding shark to swim away. We watched for a while, and then as quickly as the sharks appeared, they disappeared into the deep blue.
Needless to say, we never got up with that school of dolphin again that day. But we did have fish, and we even ended up catching a small blackfin tuna. He hit a skipped ballyhoo.
But, probably more important than the fish that day, though, was another chance to fish with Charlie and record yet another memory of a great fishing adventure.
Charlie. Every angler should have a Charlie in their life.
