I met up with Greg at the Lagoon motel early Friday morning. We went to the Redfish hole first thing to kill some time while the sun got higher. I tossed a silver dollar size pinfish out and had the first customer about ten seconds later. A nice 10lb, 32 inch Red. After a quick picture I threw a jig with an Electric Chicken SWA eel to the same spot, and immediately hooked up the twin of this one.
We hit a couple more spots with no luck and then headed outside. Greg said that the week before the majority of the Ling that had been caught were right outside the jetty so we went and joined the melee. We tried to stay outside of most of the boats so if a pod came up close to us we could at least work the fish by ourselves for a minute or two.
It was hard to stick with the plan as we watched a few boats laying right up on the jetty land the occasional fish. After a couple hours our luck changed. Greg started hollering from the tower to "get the eel ready" (we had him pinned on a big live bait hook swimming in a bucket of water). I grabbed the rod and, got ready to cast, by this time I could see them myself. A big school of 30-40 fish had popped up right in front of us, I pitched the eel into the thick of them and got hooked up immediately. Greg fired a jig into them from the tower and we had a double going. As soon as the rest of the fleet saw what was going on they charged over to try to pick off stragglers.
It was quite a fracas with both of us fighting fish. I had my hands full so Greg was stuck having to climb down out of the tower holding onto his fish, all the while a dozen boats were charging around us throwing up wakes on top of the already big ground swell. I got my fish to the boat and Greg put his rod in a holder to gaff my fish. He stuck this 25 pounder and drug it in the boat but his fish swam to the boat and got enough slack in the line to shake the jig.
We didn't see any more fish for a while so decided to head down the beach a little ways. We came up on a few smaller fish and got one to eat. This one was probably about 20 pounds but I decided to release it so we could keep a bigger fish if we found one, but it turned out to be the last one of the day.
Thats is all I have in me tonight, I apologize for any and all typos and grammatical atrocities.
I will follow up with the story of Saturday, tommorrow.
