Mahi Mahi questions

I have encountered schools of Mahi off Florida countless times and the smaller fish are typically more aggressive as you describe; they have to eat more often to survive. What you are encountering is the larger fish are not expending energy in exchange for smaller food sources that contested by thongs of smaller fish. Too much competition and the bigger fish will wait.

They have to eat like the smaller fish but seek better energy-for-food exchange. As you may know, Mahi are a short cycle fish never living more than 5 or 6 years so they grow and die fast which means they almost never stop eating. A 30-40 pound fish is likely only 2 years old and there have been documented fish that have grown 30 pounds in one year under good conditions.

What you might try is a large, deep running Rapala or a large, bright colored Marlin lure trolled if you can get off the drift from your shark fishing or casting large poppers if you have no live bait; the small fish my give chase but a 7 inch popper is likely get the interest of the larger fish. If you speed the retrieve to be faster than what the smaller fish might want to chase, the large fish with get more interested.

Another thing to try to see if you can get some live bait around the school using a Sabiki. If you are able to catch some live bait, chum the small fish to the boat and cast the live bait well past the small fish where the larger fish will beat them to chasing the live bait.

Some ideas to try anyway. Best of luck!

Hope that helps.

the best way to turn the bull and cows on is with live chuming....
the big mahi also react a lot when the hooked fish is left in the water for to long... once it start changing color they usually go away or start hanging deeper under the school. and this is when the jig comes handy and that is how i catch them on jigs.

jigs start to work for about 10 minutes after the feeding frenzy starts.

now my top secret
drop a flasher down about 40ft and bring it up and down for couple minutes, you just want to attract them back to your boat, you don't want them to find out that the flasher is not a fish. a good mahi bite last for 10 min or so and usually when the kings arrive they leave.

some people on the keys like to hit the water with paddles and cause a splash... and is said to bring the bull up.

One of my favorite trips every year is pot hopping below MV. And yes you are correct, they can be silly easy to catch or have complete lockjaw. I am no expert, but I have had fairly consistent success in our area.

I use the standard tricks:

1. Leave the first one hooked in the water while you fish for others
2. Live bait
3. Dead bait (swap out the kind of bait... use butterfish chunks and when that shuts off use ballyhoo, and when that shuts off use bluefish, etc)
4. Jigging
5. etc....

Another thing that works is leaving that particular pot for an hour and coming back. Once they spook, they
are tough to hook. But they calm back down after a while..... this is not really practical if this is just a side
line to shark chumming (don't leave the slick).

As a side note, I did find that they shut off at slack.... it sort of surprised me. I was expecting them to light up.
But I don't have enough experience to know if what I notice was a trend or an anomoly.

It is tons of fun on light tackle and tastes great!!! So when is that really good water going to push the big mahi
up so that the little guys have a shot? I know there are some out there but not in concentrated numbers or locations....

Mike