We thought the small schoolie dolphin had all passed thru migrating North for the summer, but we were wrong. A school of dolphin hit the spread and we had 6 fish hooked up in less than a minute. We were able to tag 20 fish and increase our trip tag count to 131 tags deployed.
Our fishing effort has been well-defined along the edge of the shelf off the Yucatan Pennisula. We have worked a 30 mile section of the reef in depths ranging from 100 to 400 feet. The dolphin and sailfish bites have been evenly distributed throughout the area, but the white marlin bites have only happen in the northern portion of the reef. We are still analyzing our fishing effort tracks to understand more about this. As soon as we complete the analysis we will post the tracks and tag locations on our website.
One note about navigational charts for this area is that they have not been updated in some time. You will note in the map above the extensive size of the Aerosmith Bank location. We found the size and depths displayed for the bank were off as much as 3 miles in places and totally inaccurate. Part of this may stem from the fact that the pinnacle mount dates are from 1947.
Some of the future work of the Makara will be to accurately detail bottom topography along with our track and tag points in selected fisheries. This is the topic of future blog posts about the development of a fishing effort/catch GIS tool for use by recreational fishermen. Stay tuned.
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