I am blessed to live in the 2 best places in the world for fishing as far as I am concerned; splitting my time between Lake George and Key Largo.
My oldest daughter and granddaughter live in Key Largo and my youngest and her husband live near Daytona so no matter where I am I have my kids close by.
I have a pretty good crew in both locations that I fish with and last week I was lucky enough to have my Lake George crew come down to the Keys to fish with me and my Keys crew and my worlds collided in wonderous fashion.
Lately our offshore action has been hot and heavy more to the south so this last Monday we left the dock on Lower Matecumbe at 6:00 am with only the smallest hint of daylight in the east and not a flicker of wind. One of those morning where you could waterski to Cuba if you wanted to.
We headed to the bait patches off of Hawks Cay and spent an hour or so cruising around watching our fish finder and tossing small handfuls of chum/oats out trying to find nice big balls of bait. After a while we found the mother load and threw a giant 14' cast net a couple of times and blacked out 3 live wells with pilchards.
Cruising 40k we headed straight to the offhsore humps in 1200' and tossed out handfulls of freebie pilchards until we had big blcakfin tuna boiling in back of us and we proceeded to throw live pilcahrds on 3/0 circle hook and heavy spinning rods and within 30 min had several huge 20+ lb blackfin tunas in the boat which is what we were after.
Jammed those in the cold brine and went offshore further looking for sets of birds and the fishing gods smiled on us with a few nice sets and we filled the fish box up with nice gaffer size mahi.
Back at the dock before noon with a ton of fish to clean.
My Lake George crew took all the mahi and gave me several lbs of blackfin that they asked me to bring home and transform into fish dip.
I cut the tuna loins into steaks and marinated in olive oil and everglades seasoning while I got the orion smoker ready. (love the orion)
Smoked the steaks for 20 min and let cool then combined with onion, celery, green onion, jalapeno, green pepper, mayo, hot sauce and everglades seasoning.
Came out banging.
--mud
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