Thought Id type out a few notes to share with everyone from our trip yesterday out of Steinhatchee. Dewey Johnson, Tom Keels, Jere Firth, and I left out at about 7am with Capt Brian Smith of Big Bend Charters. He keeps his boat at the new Gulfstream Motel and Marina in Steinhatchee. Gulfstream has a nice, new setup with decent rooms and a great outdoor tiki-type bar right on the river. They also have a nice shop with groceries, bait, shirts etc. right on the property. We headed straight out of the river into mildly thick fog. Seas were running 3-5 feet with a 15 knot wind. Brians 30 boat One More Time took the seas great. First stop was a bait gathering exercise. We grabbed a few pinks for bait (the captain had 60 pins waiting at the marina for us). We needed the pinks to tempt some large grouper and a jewfish waiting for us on a wreck a little further out.
We found the wreck but were unable to get any of the larger fish to cooperate. Capt Brian had brought along a new Penn 9/0 reel attached to a broomstick rod just for this occasion but it was not to be today. Dewey did pick up a nice Cobia which we invited aboard with a bit of adventure. Dewey got the Cobia to the boat after about 5 minutes and Tom Keels gaffed him. The Cobia slipped off the gaff once aboard and did a bloody deck dance until we coaxed him into the cooler (hook and line still in his mouth). It was decidedly easier to cut the line and re-rig than to continue battling with our new friend. The Cobia measured about 37 (17 lbs at the dock). Now off to find some grouper. We headed out another 10 miles or so and started finding lots of good, hard bottom in about 45-55 feet. We made several stops over the next several hours but could not find a single grouper. Undaunted, we changed tactics and decided to troll for a while. We rigged up 4 rods with various colors of Stretch 30s and started dragging along at about 5 knots. We picked up our first keeper, a small gag, and kept trolling. We caught about 6 more shorts trolling over the next hour or so and then found a great patch of bottom. As we were moving around we noticed a large shape in the water. We passed within a few feet of it and noticed the dorsal fin slicing through the water. The fin was attached to a ten foot hammerhead shark that seemed not to even notice us. What a beautiful (and large) fish.
The captains bottom machine lit up with fish and hard bottom so he marked the spot and we anchored up to check it out. It was about 2pm by now and the seas had settled down to about 1 foot with only a very light wind. Out came the bottom rigs and over the next hour we were non-stop with grouper. Started off with a few small reds but shortly we had attracted the big boys and our box was filling up nicely. We ended up taking 10 keepers off that spot before we stopped, the largest of which was a 28 gag. The grouper were hitting anything, livies, dead pins, and even Deweys special grouper sandwich which consisted of a dead pin, frozen pilchard, and piece of squid all on the hook together. Several of the bigger groupers hit rods that had been put in the holders and managed to hook themselves quite nicely, even with J hooks.
Now that we had some to take home, we pulled anchor and headed back to the hill. We stopped at a few more exploratory numbers on the way back but nothing doing. At about 5:30 we pulled up for the last time and headed in for good. Got back to the dock about 7pm to take care of the fish and pack everything up. We ended up with 101 lbs of fish between us. Captain Brian was great out there and gave us a wonderful day on the water. Check him out if youre interested - www.bigbendcharters.com.
Dewey's Cobia
Big Hammerhead
Dewey and his lizard
Kevin's Red
My Red
The Group and Catch
