priceless releases 34
On March 29, the crew aboard Priceless headed out for a day they won’t soon forget while gearing up for the upcoming Final Sail tournament in Key West, Florida. The crew included anglers Manny Fernandez, Jordan Gruber, Alejandro Martinez, Ryan Phillips and Dr. Jorge Sanchez, and crew Thomas Sims, Marcelo Pares and A.j. Sepe.
When Priceless headed out at first light they, “felt an inkling that luck would be on our side and we decided to bring extra bait,” said Capt. Tido Sanchez. “We usually use pilchards for chumming purposes and decided to net some on the way out. Little did we know that they would be the key to our success that day.”
With two wells topped off with bait, Capt. Tido Sanchez and the crew aboard Priceless set out to the edge, fishing around the Blue Fire Wreck south of Fowey Rocks in about 150 feet of water. Seeing tailers on the way south, the conditions looked favorable, but they could not entice the attention of the tailing sailfish.
By 12:30 pm, the crew was only four for six on sailfish and had a couple dolphin in the box when they received a call from Capt. Dean Panos saying that he had found a few more bites to the North off of Government Cut. Picking up and running north, they began to fish along the county wrecks, and the fish started to bite.
Capt. Sanchez says, “I believe the combination of the tide switching at one-o-clock and the wind picking up is what really turned the bite on.” At one point, they even decided to pull in the kites because of all the tailers they were seeing on the surface between 100 and 220 feet. In addition to sailfish, they even spotted a pack of four bluefins surfing down the waves.
Around 4:45 pm, the crew had 18 sailfish and put out the kites in hopes of catching number 20. With very little “good bait” left, they thought it would be extremely difficult release two more fish. Topping their goal for the day, they ended up catching 16 more sailfish out of the kites and ran out of bait at 6:45 PM.
Capt Sanchez described the experience by saying, “The bite was non-stop once we put the kites back out. They were way more fired up about the two-inch pilchards we had out on the kite-baits than the goggle eyes and herring we were fishing with earlier that day. We ended up going 34 for 43 and must have seen well over 100 fish.”
