Not long after, Dave had a massive hit and this fish was heading to St. Marks.
The grueling process of give and take took more than half an hour, thinking for sure he had a big cobia on but then we saw the deep color and that long tail.
Didnt think them big boys came in this close. This thing must be 8-9' long and likely more than 200lb.
Dave was beat by then, so we ran back inshore to 5' water with trout in our mind. However, Dave apparently was still in offshore mode.
To his credit, he did put a few nice trout in the box for the next 3 hours, including this 22' fattie.
The water temperature inshore was 81 degree, so the trout should be in their fall pattern soon. The fish were there and bitting aggressively but with the 5 mph west wind and a strong outgoing tide, we were drifting at a blazing speed of 0.2 knots. We were practically sitting still most of the time. But we did ended up with a mess of fish.
I always like sesame seared yellowfin tuna so thought why not giving the catfish loin a try. It was not as good as tuna but still very eatable. The pieces that were still raw in the middle were tasting better than the fully cooked ones.
the lateral line is very distinctive and pretty strong tasting. we usually remove the darkest sections.