9/13
Met up with Jim Ervin (RedMann) and Jon, one of my coworkers (hyphenate as you like), around 6:45 and we loaded up on bait and ice, and headed on down to the ramp. As we headed out into the channel, I put the tabs down and got the boat up on a plane nice and quick, as expected. As I went to bring the tabs back up the boat rolled hard to starboard and scared the bejeezus out of all of us. After scratching our heads for a moment it turned out that the port actuator was stuck. We ended up having to run with the tabs all the way down all day. Not too bad, but it really guzzles the gas.
We stopped off at the Dog Island Reef to try to catch some pinfish, but no luck there. We did manage to catch a couple of threadfins at the buoy though. After that, we decided to run out and look for some grouper. On our way to our next number, we saw several large schools of spanish just tearing it up on top, with birds all over above them. We tried throwing jigs, topwater, and even trolling spoons and dusters, and they wouldn't hit anything we put in front of them. We ended up running on to our next spot anyway.
The first stop yielded a few shorts and a couple of breakoffs, but not terribly much else. After a while we decided to just idle over to another nearby spot and look for bottom on the way. We saw what looked like a small ledge of sorts, so we anchored up and gave it a try. Good thing we did, because Jon caught a nice 30" gag, followed by Jim with a 25" gag, followed by Jon again with a 24" gag. There were a few shorts in between. Every once in a while one of our flatlined cigar minnows would start screaming, and we'd start to pull in a good sized spanish. For some reason, though, they kept spitting the hooks, or the hooks were pulling somehow. We did manage to get three of the spanish into the cooler, though. One nice suprise was a 45" king that gave Jim a nice workout.
One (recurring) highlight of the day was watching Jon get abused by some big sharks. I had decided to drop a butterflied grunt down on one of my heavier rods (Penn 6/0, 80 lb test, 100lb leader, etc), and in less than 5 minutes the rod bent over double and the drag was screaming. Did I mention it was 80lb test? Jon was the first one to the rod, and the fight was on. I offered him a fighting belt, but he thought they were a bit sissy. About 10 minutes later he decided he'd better take me up on the offer. Right as I clipped the belt onto him, the shark cut him off.
The same scenario played itself out another 5-6 time that day. Jon stepped up to the heaviest tackle on the boat, and still kept getting broken off, tail whipped off, etc. Once we even hooked up on the same shark at the same time. We never even saw the sharks, since we couldn't get them close enough to the boat. I've caught them in the 8-9' range before, but we couldn't even turn the heads on these ones. Jon has a bit of a vendetta now. I think he'll be shopping for some aircraft cable before our next trip.
Not many grouper in the box, but a fun day was had by all. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but nobody on the boat had a digital camera with them. I made sure to buy one a couple of days later. Total for the day:
3 grouper
3 spanish
1 king
1 trigger fish
buncha grunts
9/20
Tom Keels, my wife Darlene, and I all headed out with high hopes. Tom and I had been psyched up all week, given the forecast: 2' or less, 0% chance of rain. Oh yeah, we were going to slay them. Heading out of the channel it was every bit of 3', and they were stacked up. That's ok, we figured, when the sun comes out it will lay down a bit. Yeah, right. We trolled around a bit, anchored up at a few spots, caught a bunch of shorts and a few that were almost keepers. We weren't out very long though when it had built to 3-4's with the occasional 5'. That, combined with the fact that the 0% chance of rain turned into one heck of a thunderstorm that kept us pretty well soaked, convinced us to call it an early day and head on back to the hill.
Good thing the tabs were working, otherwise we'd have been hurting. I've got to say thanks to Tabman from Bennett Trim Tabs. He overnighted us a new actuator right away. That's what I call service.
On the bright side, we did get a decent picture of the boat on the water:
Total for the day:
1 trigger fish
buncha grunts
buncha groans
couple of bruises
Wil