Eventually, we (especially I) had enough of the boat ride and we started to fish within sight of S Tower. Immediately after dropping a bait down, a guy on the right side of the boat had a big snapper on his line. Then I felt a powerful tug on mine. I fought the fish for about 10 seconds, and it was gone. I checked my line for bait. There was no bait. There was no leader. It broke or came loose from my three-way swivel. Man, I wish I knew what kind of that fish was.
Twenty minutes later, I hooked into another big fish, big enough to pull out some drag. It turned out to be one of our big snapper, which were 31” and 32” long. As I started removing my hook, I saw that it had a second hook and leader coming from its mouth. Now, one of the other guys on the boat is going to claim the fish or an assist for bringing it up, I thought. As I worked on removing the hooks, I realized they were both mine. I could tell from the Snell knots attaching the hooks to the leaders. I hooked the same snapper twice.
With the rough seas, I didn’t bring the underwater camera. So there are no underwater pictures from this trip.
We used a variety of baits: live cigar minnows, frozen LYs, and bonito strips. The fish seemed to prefer bonito strips on Thursday.
With a quartering following sea to a beam sea, the boat ride back to Carrabelle was much faster than the way out, but it was still wet.
Here’s what made it to the fillet table:

By the way, somebody at work did this to a fillet of one of the snapper above:

Looks delicious to me.