Hard work pays off for fishing captain with back-to-back tournament wins

Captain Jason Boyll has been fishing quite a bit over the past month for work, pleasure and competition. In the middle of it all he was able to secure not one, but two victories in tournaments for catching monster Warsaw grouper in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico.

“I fished for 20 straight days,” Boyll said. “I ran doubles 10 straight days and had the tournaments in between. Tournaments are fun, it’s a different world and keeps it fresh.”

The first tournament Boyll headed deep for was the Sarasota Slam. Split into multiple divisions, Boyll and team fished in 520 feet of water going for the biggest grouper.

“I was with Alex Kompothecras aboard his 39 foot Seavee,” Boyll said. “It was pretty rough, but the boat ate it up.”

With a 15-knot wind and a sideways current, Boyll had to do some calculations to get anchored on his spot. Dropping anchor nearly 2,000 feet from where you’re trying to fish isn’t easy, but he was able to make it work.

“If you miss you have to drag the anchor around to get it reset,” Boyll said. “It’s measuring out based on the wind and the current where you’re going to sit. We got on it but then the current was pushing so hard we sat 30 degrees off from the wind.

“It took nearly four pounds of lead to get baits to the bottom. I would normally prefer using 16 to maybe 32 ounces, so that shows how hard it was moving.”

Not much is known about the lifecycle of the big deepwater grouper, but Boyll says deep water structures like wrecks and peaks are loaded with fish right now, perhaps gathering for spawn.

“It’s not uncommon to see 50 or more on a spot,” he said, describing how they show big on depth finders. “You try to get through the smaller ones by using bigger baits up to 30 pounds.”

Dropping large baits for the bigger fish, Boyll and crew would find themselves on the end of a monster. After a battle from the deep, their Sarasota Slam Warsaw was 193.34 pounds, good enough for first place.

“With only 24 hours in these shorter tournaments it’s tough to get a real big Warsaw like you might see on the multiple day ones. You don’t see a lot of 200-pound fish in these,” Boyll said. “The fish might only feed for 45 minutes to an hour and you have to make the best of that short window.”

The following weekend, Boyll was back out again for the Grouper Grapple tournament out of Fort Myers, this time aboard a 34-foot Seavee in 570 feet of water.

Boyll himself was dropping when his bait was eaten.

“I had a fish on and the rod broke, leaving only the bottom two guides,” he said. “It came unhooked at that time. I dropped the bait back down anyway and ended up hooking into another fish!”

Despite the difficulty of a broken rod, Boyll was able to get another monster lifted off the bottom. It involved brute force and a lot of cranking. That fish went 196.6 pounds and was once again big enough to take first place.

Two weekends, two tournaments, two monster Warsaw grouper, and two first place finishes.

This story was originally published August 18, 2018 at 5:15 PM.