Econfina 12/16/2006

[Frank Bradfield]

Headed out about 9:30 on low water. Crew consisted of myself, Pinfishking, his son Gregory, friend Adam and my son Ben. Had our usual bou't with the trout fisherman which I will get to later on. There was only a light chop out to 12 miles where we decided to start. Threw over the 25 +'s , 1st spot, no luck trolling, we dropped and got a 16" sea bass. 2nd spot , nothing, trolled some more, nothing. Ran over spot # 3 and Gregory picked up a 24" gag. We could not get another bite trolling or on the bottom but were marking fish. I decide to take one for the team and suit up. The water is a cool 58 degrees when I splash in but my DUI drysuit had me pretty warm ! I make my way to the bottom and the vis is pushing 25 ft. It dosen't take long to figure the fish were just not biting, I could see at least 20 keeper grouper before i hit the bottom probably ended up seeing 50 on this spot. They could also see me and began moving away from the ledge. As I begin working my way up the ledge ,i'm mumbleing something to myself about how they never stay still when one pokes his head out and i quickly put the spear in him. Getting him strung up we kicked up a dust storm. Moving on down the ledge I see some grouper dropped in behind me in the dust storm. I just turned and waited and put the shaft into the biggest one that swam through. He made it under the ledge with my shaft. A big fish and a small ledge he managed to get stuck real good. I could barely reach his tail. I gave it about 10 minutes and decided to move on and come back later. I picked off another nice gag and went back to see if I could get my shaft and the big gag. After about 10 more minutes of me , just not giving up I managed to work him out. The crew picked up 2 more trolling but that was about it. A very small window for the hook & line bite today. We hit a couple more spots and I finished off my limit of gags and got 3 fat trigger's, while the guys on top slayed the Seabass. One spot had 3 or 4 small hogfish on it and at least 1000 + nice sea bass, all mixed in with the grouper and grunts. Water temp stayed 58 all day, depths 20 - 30 ft all day, vis was 15 -25 . I'm already ready to go back, I think its a sickness !






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[birddog]

Good mess of fish Frank. Thanks for the report.

[Knot Tester]

Had our usual bou't with the trout fisherman which I will get to later on.

I think 1 month is long enought to wait for "the rest of the story".