The first trip was scheduled due to a promise I made to one of our employees, Amanda, to take her and her boyfriend out to target cobia. The good news is we found them, the somewhat less fortunate news is we found lots of shorts. I think this bothered me far more than it did them, as Amanda said she liked the idea of tagging the fish more than she did keeping them. With meat in the freezer I couldn't argue against the logic so we enjoyed tagging multiple cobia. Can't say we didn't hook any keepers as we lost a few big bites. In addition to the cobia, Amanda landed a NICE sized mackerel, and earlier in the day while fishing for bait her boyfriend Jon landed some really nice keeper trout in 10' to 12' waters.
Another positive result of the trip was finally getting to test out a couple of Swann Freestyle cameras given to me almost seven months ago for my birthday. Helped me do something I haven't done in earlier videos... actually capture strikes / bites!
Still need to do a bit of work to get the cameras setup better (times are wrong in the video/mounted one upside down) but all in all I like them a great deal, especially since they are half the price of the GoPros, and come with voice activation, remote control activation, and a lcd screen included. Here's the first footage I captured.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqUFVgwQ-OA[/video]
Sunday I was fortunate enough to make a trip out with my closest fishing buddy, Sharkman. Between 2002 and 2008 we worked at the same plant and fished together almost every other weekend, but job changes have made getting together much more challenging these past few years. Cool thing about close friendships is that the space of time doesn't affect them, and so it was with the trip out with Sharkman. Didn't hurt the friendship that we ended up doubling on reds AND cobia!
We wanted to test some new spotlights on my boat so we met up at 5:00am and ran out to the flats... only to find it was ROUGH! So we decided to fish for redfish a bit before running offshore. The craziest thing was that we had a wind blowing from the south in the dark that was fairly warm, but about 30 minutes after the sun came up the wind shifted and was coming at us from the north and was VERY COLD. It wasn't that the wind picked up as it does on many mornings... it actually slowed a bit, but what hit us was COLD! The good news is the cold didn't keep us from snagging a few reds.
Ran offshore despite it being a bit choppy and quickly doubled on cobes. Managed to boat one nice keeper as well as to release a few shorts before the sharks showed up. Actually had both a hammer and a bull visit the boat, with the bull biting and providing Sharkman a GREAT fight! Made for a fun trip as hope the video shows. Good times with good friends out on the water... that really is what it's all about!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXV1JaVPnE0[/video]
