Since I have not been out on the big pond in 2024 and some of my coworkers felt I have been stressed, I decided to take a day off and go to the hatch with a few buddies for the day. We caught a few sheeps last year and really wanted to hit them hard this year. I got my good luck charm...
We met up after work and headed south, we stayed at the Steinhatchee River Inn apartment that used to be the Blue Heron, man do I miss the prices from those days at the Hatch. We were going to stay at Seahag but apparently the person that does their booking only works till 3 and during the week and no one else there does it. Never the less, Kathis was excellent as usual.
We hit Seahag for some fiddlers and shrimp and got the boat in the water, and we hammered down into the mist, which took me back to my bass tourney days.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5a1b6b9n ... cixjn&dl=1[/video]
Which by the way the resume safe operation sign is missing in the river.
We hit the steinhatchee reef with high hopes, and were immediately let down
I have 2 points that are supposed to have good concrete but I could find nothing on the side scan, I'm guessing the recent hurricanes have covered a bunch of stuff up. After hitting several spots with only a short seabass to show for it, we went deeper, hitting one spot with nothing to show for just a few minutes before heading to the Gspot. This spot never fails to at least deliver grunts if nothing else. And it did deliver some grunts but then a few minutes in, paydirt:
We caught a few sheeps and a bunch of grunts and the bite fell off, so we decided to head to 40ft to a new spot we havent tried before.
It is named the Hog and I really wish the regulations were still 12in because I love to eat them and we caught several
We also caught several of the supposedly rare Gag Grouper and some Red grouper that were just a little too short
All in all a good time was had, though I was tempted to run out even deeper, which thankfully I didn't do as my low oil light came on with 7 miles to Marker No 1, but it was smooth sailing back
We made it back to the ramp to see a nice couple of whom the wife had just learned how to back the boat in and was looking for a martini to celebrate.
Now, I have been going to Steinhatchee for a while as this marks year 11 since I have started flats fishing, I never would have expected to see someone teleworking from the boat ramp parking lot, but there he was and not nearly as exited about our fish coolers as we were, in fact he left when we started unloading the boat.
But who wouldnt have been happy about full coolers?
Or the cleaning table when the coolers were split 4 ways.
But I digress, as we headed back to South GA we got behind the previous couple and I smelled the smell that no one towing a boat wants to smell, the smell of a tire getting hot. The tire was smoking either from hitting the fender or the bearing going bad so we flagged them down and got them stopped before they got too far down the road.
The lone surviving fiddler ended up making the cats nights as well
Now I have to get corn trials planted so I can get free to go again!
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