Hit it early with Barfly this morning and made our way to the beach to join the floatilla (KOB and all of the good reports lately from the area). We set out around 6:45 from NE St. Pete and made a pit stop near the pier for bait. The bait was small but plentiful, with a couple of tosses and no chumming we had a well full and headed toward the beach.

Made a quick stop at the last marker out of Pass A Grille to see if there were any bigger baits around but didn't see any on the bottom machine, didn't get any with a few tosses of the sabiki and didn't see any of the other boats doing anything sabiking either so we didn't stay long.

We went a little north of where we were a couple of weekends ago to a spot that Captain Rick Frazier had told me about. When we got there we saw Captain Rick but there were about 10 other boats there so we couldn't get close enough to give him a holler without encroaching on other anchored vessels. We tooled around a little while a couple of hundred yards away from the others when John saw about a three to four foot break on the bottom machine so we just anchored up there.

After we started catching them we had others anchor up closer to us than we would have, but far enough away not to be an aggravation.

We got the chum slick going put out a couple of flat lines and Barfly worked the bottom. Man, he was on fire... I'm guessing he pulled in about 20 short grouper, a couple of what looked like black sea bass and a couple of other species that I don't recall all while I was waiting to boat my first fish. Finally, a hook up on my side of the boat, but it was a ramora... oh well.

Things did start to pick up from there as we were both catching mackerel on the flat lines when one of Barfly's starts to singing. ZZZZZZZ... and we're off. We were both thinking that it was a king, but when we got a look it turned out to be a Bonito, and good sized!

The mackerel action wasn't great but steady. They weren't near as big as the ones we caught a couple of weeks ago, but they weren't bad either. Had a couple more singing reels on Barfly's side of the boat... one more bonito (about the same size), and a schoolie king around 30 inches.

All in all a great day, lots of action, a new spot near and old spot, 2 bonito, 1 king, 1 ramora, a mess of mackerel, a couple of other species, and more short grouper than we cared to count.

The weather was great, but the wind started picking up and we were done with our chum blocks so we headed in around 12.

The only downer of the day were the "charmers" trolling for kingfish that felt they needed to to either repeatedly cut through our chum slick or come across our bow close enough to talk to. Hope they got skunked, but either way we weren't going to let them spoil the fun.