There were a few storms around but they didn't affect us and it was a beautiful day but got hot when the breeze died around noon. We hit public numbers in the 85 foot range hoping for snapper. I was just hoping I would be able to find the spots with the gps and depth finder. I had put in the numbers the night before after pouring over the survey's of the reefs and the depth I wanted to target. I zoomed the old gray scale depth finder range in and sure enough found the artificial reefs without much problem.
We had action most of the day from a variety of fish. We had a little trouble with huge remora that kept coming up to the boat and hanging out chasing our baits down. About 8 sharks got caught with most being 4 to 5 feet making for some good fights. One nearly pulled Pierce out of the boat when it got up to the surface and decided to head back for the bottom. We had several groups of small dolphin/mahi swim up and we added a couple to the cooler on trout rods which was fun. I managed to get a nice king in while bottom fishing after the circle hook got it perfectly in the corner of it's toothy mouth. We caught two nice lane snapper and Billy got the only red snapper but it was a nice one at 27" and probably about 20 pounds. A nice grunt found itself on ice too.
We fried up the grunt, some lane snapper, and some king, along with hush puppies and cheese grits for supper that night and stuffed ourselves silly. It was a good day and I was glad to get to host Billy for his son's first offshore outing.
Billy with the red snapper.
