Winter Sailfish Part Two: Dead Bait or Live

Sails are amazing acrobats
when hooked and fought.

Over the past few seasons Florida has experienced phenomenal winter runs of Atlantic sailfish. In fact, the season has gotten longer each year, as the population appears to be growing due to major regulatory action taken against pelagic long lining about ten years ago. With the long line fleet rapidly dwindling, and areas where their bycatch of sailfish and marlin was the highest closed to that gear the beneficiaries have been the stocks and anglers.

Live goggleye with a circle hook
in the nose for slow trolling.

While more people are fishing for sails, recreational fishing mortality is at an all time low with the advent of circle hooks and a stronger appreciation for these great billfish. The use of circle hooks has greatly reduced release mortality of both sailfish and white marlin, where the main techniques used for catching both is using either live or rigged dead baits. Circle hooks work by wrapping around the jaw structure of the fish so they are hooked in the corner of the mouth or on the bill. No damage to gills, stomach or throat, no bleeding, easy to remove, and away the fish swim — a little tired from the fight, but no worse for the encounter!

Loading up the live well with live
goggleyes for a days sailfishing.

Two techniques dominate fishing for sailfish — using live bait or trolling with rigged dead ballyhoo. Live bait is most popular from West Palm Beach south to the Florida Keys, with the prime baitfish being goggleyes and greenies, a species of sardine. Serious live bait fishermen use kites, but you can also slow troll a drift fish with live bait and even put them deep on downriggers. Personally I love kite fishing because it leads to savage strikes by aggressive fish right on the surface.

Dead ballyhoo rigged for trolling
with a circle hook.

A fishing kite is run out away from the boat with up to three release clips attached to it at various distances. A live baitfish is suspended from each release clip with the line run through a ring so the angler can control the baitfish from his vantage point on the boat. By letting line out or reeling up slack, he can keep the live bait splashing on the surface of the water, calling out to any sailfish in the area that there is an injured and easy prey item waiting to be eaten. Properly set up, a single angler can control two or three baits suspended from a single kite. When a sailfish pounces, the angler puts the reel in gear and winds slowly to pull the line out of the release clip, then winds like crazy to pick up the slack so the circle hook will wrap around the fish’s jaw.  

Launching a fishing kite. Note the
release clips on the line.

But you don’t have to go to the expense of buying kites, kite reels, rods and all the trimmings to fish live bait. I’ve spent many days fishing off the Florida coast drifting or slow trolling live bait. I even use a downrigger to get live bait down to deep feeding sails and there have been many days that the deep bait has caught the majority of the fish.

Competition trollers rely
on massive dredges as
teasers to attract sails
to their baits.

Trolling with rigged bait is a whole other ballgame. Small ballyhoo are rigged on circle hooks with small chin weights so they swim when trolled and fished using light lever drag reels and rods. Trolling is preferred by anglers north of the Palm Beach area because of the difference in near shore depth and structure. Sails in this area tend to spread out over larger areas, sometimes key on structure that accumulates baitfish. But just the rigged ballyhoo are frequently not enough to attract sails, so a subsurface teaser called a dredge is added to the trolling pattern as an attractor. A dredge is a six-arm wire frame with a couple dozen or more rigged ballyhoo or mullet, with no hooks, pulled behind it. It is dragged 20 to 50 feet behind the boat and weighted so it will run 10 to 20 feet down so it resembles a bait ball or school of baitfish. Tournament anglers use all natural baits on their dredges, but there are bait-free dredges available that are less time consuming and expensive to use that incorporate plastic imitation baitfish or strips of clear material with adhesive baitfish decals strung from them. They present a lot of flash in the water and can attract sailfish well, but if the sail attacks an artificial dredge it will not hang around long. The key is to get the approaching sailfish to switch off the dredge and eat one of the rigged ballyhoo being trolled nearby.

Most Atlantic sailfish are
in the 40 to 60 lb class
like this one, ideal for
light tackle.

Most serious sailfish guys use 20 pound test tackle because Atlantic sails rarely get much larger than 60 or 70 pounds. The vast majority are smaller, which makes them easy to handle on light line and a lot more fun. All the dedicated sailfish tournaments held in Florida during the winter require tackle no heavier than 20 pound test and mandate the use of circle hooks, too. Sails might be small compared to their larger cousins the striped, blue and black marlin, but they are very strong, extremely acrobatic and great fun to catch and release on the right tackle. If you’ve never done it, spend some time down south this winter and get in on the fun. I know I will.

Caputi Blog Tip:

Fluorocarbon leader is a must for sharp-eyed sailfish whether trolling or using live bait and there is none better than Hi-Seas 100% Fluorocarbon or Hi-Seas Quattro Fluorocarbon. Plan on using 60-pound test, which is plenty strong when paired with 20-pound test monofilament running line like Hi-Seas Grand Slam in Hi-Vis Yellow. Acceptable leader length varies from tournament to tournament so be sure to read the rules carefully and rig your tackle accordingly. 

Winter Sailfish: Tournament Time

While December for northerners means it’s time to pull the boat and winterize it or hang up the waders for another season, for those lucky enough to live in sunny Florida it is the start of the winter sailfish season. There is no better time to catch these feisty billfish than December and January when the occasional cold front accompanied by Northeast winds cause them to gather in large schools and go on the hunt. Early winter finds them concentrated in the more northern reaches of Florida’s east coast, but as water temperatures drop and the bait they pursue pushes further south, so do the sailfish. The migration will take them into South Florida and the Keys.

For the past six years I’ve been the director of one of the oldest billfish tournaments in the United States, the Buccaneer Cup Sailfish Release Tournament, which has been run out of the West Palm Beach area each January for the past 47 years! Since I got involved it has been operated as a fund raising event for the Recreational Fishing Alliance (www.joinrfa.org), generating tens of thousands of dollars each year for the important work the organization does as the sole political action organization representing saltwater anglers. AFW/Hi-Seas is a corporate sponsor of the RFA and the Buccaneer Cup and we would certainly love to have you come fish with us this year.

Last year the fishing during the Buccaneer Cup was nothing short of incredible! In fact the number of sailfish caught hit an all-time high with more sailfish being released in the three days of fishing than at any other time during the events long history! The teams successfully caught and released a staggering 585 sailfish and saw hundreds more in massive schools stretching from Ft. Pierce to Jupiter Inlet. They experienced fishing so fast, both trolling with rigged baits and kite fishing with live bait, that teams were returning to the dock at day’s end exhausted and telling stories about how many more got away. Release flags were flying everywhere and it was a sight to see.

Why has the fishing for sails gotten so good? From my estimation it is the result of the work of the Recreational Fishing Alliance in forcing the government to close several key areas in the South Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida to all commercial pelagic long line fishing. The problem with long line fishing is the gear not only catches and kills juvenile swordfish by the thousands, it also catches and kills sailfish and marlin as bycatch. The facts show that the number of sailfish being slaughtered by an out of control long line fleet was far in excess of anything the National Marine Fisheries Service thought at the time. In the 11 years since these regulations were put in place the sailfish population has grown rapidly to levels not seen in 50 years and the swordfish population has rebounded so successfully that there is a vibrant recreational fishery for them again up and down the East Coast.

There are two popular techniques for catching sails both for fun and in tournaments – live bait fishing with or without kites and trolling with rigged ballyhoo. We will take a closer look at both techniques in my next blog and pay special attention to easy ways you can get in on the fun without the expense of the techniques used by top tournament teams with unlimited budgets. So stay tuned.

Keep in mind that Atlantic sailfish are among the smallest billfish, and in Florida the average fish tends to be in the 40 to 60 lb range, so light tackle, both spinning and conventional, is all you need to enjoy the fight. The Buccaneer Cup prohibits line heavier than 20 lb. test during competition and sails are still caught and released in short order, usually after a spirited fight with lots of aerial acrobatics. They are truly a great sport fish to catch and the overwhelming number of anglers who pursue them releases every one they catch. They might make beautiful mounts for the wall, but all you need is a length measurement and any taxidermist can make you a fiberglass representation of your catch without ever seeing the fish.

If you are going to be in Florida this winter, here’s your chance to get in on one of the oldest and most prestigious billfish tournaments in the nation. Come fish the Buccaneer Cup with us by going to www.buccaneercup.com and singing up today. The dates are January 19 through 21 in sunny Florida, and if you don’t have a boat of your own that meets the requirements, there are plenty of boats available for charter for the event. We can help you with that, too. It’s for a great cause and if the action is anything like last year, the sails will run you ragged.