You may have noticed it; not every day mind, but just often enough to confirm suspicions that summer is over. It can still be not much short of hot and the humidity can be right up there but there are those calm, cool mornings with hardly any moisture in the air and the sense of lightness that we associate with the autumn.There has been some really excellent fishing over the last week or so. Most of this has come from trolling and is probably the result of the pelagic fish being on the move.Most of the trolling has been of the more traditional nature, utilising rigged baits and artificial lures or combinations thereof. There has been considerably less emphasis on live-baiting even though there is probably something in the way of benefits to be reaped from such activities.Catches have been nice mixed bags of wahoo, tuna and dolphin. Many of the wahoo have been of a nice size; mostly in the 30-pound plus range. The tuna have also been nice middleweights, ideal for sports action and just about the right size for stockpiling some frozen fish for the wintry months ahead.Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the numbers and outstanding quality of the dolphin. More properly referred to these days as dolphinfish or by its Spanish moniker, “dorado”, this species is never really common in the Bermuda area and the ones that are tend to be on the lower end of the size scale.Some of the fish caught over the last week or so have weighed in at over 40 pounds and that is pretty hefty for a species that locally averages nearer eight to ten pounds.Not that they have always been small fish. Bermuda is probably getting to the northernmost part of their range; they do like the really warm tropical seas. Local line class records range from 17.8 pounds on 4-lb test line all the way up to a whopping (by our standards!) 63 pounds on 30 lb. test line.Beyond a couple of exceptional fish over 60 pounds, most of the rest of the local records are in the 25 -40lb range. In contrast, the world line class records are all from about 58 (in the 2-lb line class) to the high 80’s. The majority of locations for such catches are getting on for equatorial with Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama figuring prominently in the proceedings. The record hot spots are not limited to the Americas though, there is at least one from the eastern Atlantic, off Senegal, and they can and do turn up just about anywhere in the warm deep blue.Another positive thing about dolphin (as we refer to them) is that they are incredibly fast growers and reach what we would call a marketable size in less than a year. They are very active and because of their high metabolic rate tend to be voracious feeders. For that reason, they can be caught on just about anything; be it bait or even just a plain shiny metal hook. As schooling fish, they are very competitive and will actually fight over baits, making it possible to catch an entire school at times. Larger fish usually run in pairs or trios: a single male accompanied by one or two females. Males are easily distinguished by their square, almost blunt, foreheads. They generally attain larger sizes than the females although they too can be formidable on lighter classes of tackle.Although the beds of seaweed generally are not the mother lode of fish that they are elsewhere, the significant increase in the numbers of dolphin that have been caught recently is probably in some way connected to the weed’s arrival. If you think it through, the weed drifts here on the ocean currents and fish that are located in the same block or eddy of water will come with it too. So while the dolphin may not actually be associated with the seaweed, they may inhabit the same block of water for other reasons and wind up here because this is where the water has arrived. Among the other reasons might be the presence of bait fish or a particularly comfortable water temperature.Satellite research and water temperature probes and records have identified spin-offs or eddies of water that break off from the Gulf Stream or other current and then travel in various directions. This has become such a science that in the United States and elsewhere, there are actually services that charge for the intelligence that the interpretation of such data can provide. Some fishermen rely on this type of information to decide where they should fish and or where they are most likely to encounter certain species of fish. There are warm water eddies, cold water eddies and the areas of ocean that are unaffected by the movement of eddies.Those bodies of water that move through the world ocean can carry concentrations of fish within them, hence the value of being able to follow them as they move. A bit of a tall order out here in the middle of nowhere; but a valuable tool in the, more or less, coastal fisheries of the US East Coast.Just as an update to an ongoing research project, the IGFA has successfully deployed the 10 PSAT’s (Pop-up Satellite Archival Tags) on blue marlin during the recent Puerto Rican billfish tournament and related angling. These tags will be released 120 days after application and will “pop up” to the surface, from which point they will download all the data they have amassed to a satellite in orbit over the earth. In turn, that date is sent from the satellite to a receiving station where the scientists will start to analyse the data that has been collected. This will include details of location, water temperature and depth, thereby providing a rather vivid picture of the four months’ worth of wanderings that has been conducted by each individual fish. The competition aspect of the IGFA event is that there is an award for the fish that travels the farthest.When you think that all the previous sorts of tags used only provided end points of data, this completion would not really have been possible. In fact, the data collected is infinitely more useful material than the information collected back in the “good old days”.Back then, a simple tag return might have been made very close to where the original capture and tagging was carried out, suggesting that the fish had not moved very far. In reality, the fish could have gone several hundred miles and then returned to the original area months or even years later, offering lots of opportunity for ambiguity and really no idea of the travels of your agent for Tight lines!!!