We attempted to catch bait at the sea buoys, and managed 1 small blue runner and 1 razor belly in about 15 minutes and decided pretty quick we better go if we wanted to do any fishing at all. I punched up the number for the One More Time and we ran WOT the 3 miles to the wreck.
I was very surprised at the amount of good structure and hard bottom around the main wreck. We anchored just to the east of the main structure and dropped down some frozen baits. Nothing was happening for a little bit. Then Wil's wife Darlene's rod bends double, and she is yelling "UH OH! UH OH!". To say she was surprised would be an understatement. But she fought and fought and got her first grouper in the boat, a nice 23" keeper.
We caught several shorts in quick succession, then as Wil was putting out a flat line, his rod, which was in the rod holder, began to bend and contort in ways I don't think Penn designed it for. He grabbed it and fight was on. Wil was using a 6/0 with 80 pound test and it was give and take for a while, but finally this nice 30 incher came boatside.
8:30 and we have 2 keepers in the box. Not bad for a day when it looked like we may not get to fish at all.
A few minutes later and a few shorts later, the flat line begins to scream. Wil grabbed it and the fish just never stopped and went right into the wreck. The next fish on the flat line was a 24" AJ. I was still trying to catch bait on a sabiki, but ended up with a ladyfish and a spadefish.
At 10:00 it looked like the next round of storms was not going to miss us so we decided we would pay Waterdog a visit at his house on the river. It was getting close to lunchtime so we decided to fry up the 2 grouper. I don't know when I've had better fish than that. DoubleD must have smelled it cooking because he showed up just as it was coming out of the grease. We sat under the tent, watching it rain, eating fresh fried grouper, and drinking a few cold ones. Couldn't get much better than that.
