re: Fishing plans for this weekend

Well I guess I’ll give a little report as a weekend results kinda deal.

Overall I’m not sure you can top weekends like this. So my buddy is on his second summer with a big boy boat. This summer it’s an Everglades 335. Here’s a little boat porn for yah


Everglades walkaround

Optimus 360 Joystick Demo



This is after the flir was installed


Needless to say this boat is wayyy above my pay grade and is farrrr more capable than I will ever be but we are sure going to give it our all.

We get to Mary Esther about 9pm On thursday night and I know I have a long night ahead of me. I’ve gotta get our trolling rig geared up and put top shots on all of the new talicas as well as gear out some tuna feathers and jet heads. Once we get all the rods geared up my buddy crashes at about 1230 and I’ve still gotta setup the outriggers with 400lb mono instead of the shite nylon crap they come with. I finally get this finished and some gps numbers plugged in and it’s time to wake up the rest of the crew at 4 to load the boat and get ice. Guess it’s gunna be a no sleep fishing day for me. At 5am we are heading down the inter coastal to the destin pass with the rigid blinding, JLs blasting, radar wirling and the flir lighting up the night. I’m sure we looked like the biggest group of googans ever but we thought we looked badass with the boat filled up with rods and the riggers extended on our way for our first fishing trip of the year.

We stop in the destin pass and start searching for some live cigar minnows. Within thirty minutes we had our bait and we were on the run again autopilot engaged due south and cruising at 26 knots. We get to our first bottom dropping spot that I had done some research on and our sonar lit up. I’m smiling as I’m handing rods out and cutting squid to get ready for the drop. First few drops and they are playing with us but we catch a few but they are all very small. Then all of a sudden it’s on and I’m pulling up real nice sized bee liners. My buddy decides he wants to drop a jig down and see what happens. Within minutes he’s hooked up to what was fighting like an AJ. Fighting that fish for ten minutes and then he’s gone. He broke the hook off of my Shimano butterfly jig. I guess I’ll have to start learning how to rig those on now.

During this fight we drifted off a little bit and we motor on back to get back into some action. We find a few fish here and there but the current is picking up so it’s becoming hard to hold the boat over our spot as we are admittedly rookies at this whole offshore thing. A few more beeliners an Almaco Jack and a few red snapper and I decide to adrip a jig down. A few minutes of working and wam good fish pulling drag off the sargosa. Next thing i know it’s screaming even faster and because we aren’t around a rig to cut us off I let it run and start chasing it with the boat. This big bitch anchored down on the bottom and we played tug of war for twenty minutes. In that that I screamed more f bombs every time he started pulling drag that I so corageously fought for twenty minutes ago. I drank about two beers during the fight to numb the pain of forgetting any kind of cushit or gut bucket to soften the blow of the metal rod butts. Finally I’m making progress on this fish and I can see color. To my disappointment it’s a 5-6ft shark who stole what looked to be some kind of grouper. I can’t say for sure because as soon as he was getting close enough to see he turned his head popped my line and said I was out of here. I wasn’t too bummed since I got to see what he was and I was more impressed with my knots and gear more than anything haha. After that fight we decide we are itching to swing out the riggers and start trolling for some blackfin and mahi. We pull lines in and make another 12 or so miles offshore.

Out goes the riggers with some tuna feathers and jet heads and the flats pulling a Yozuri Bonita and a cd30. We are limited to four lines until we get some rocket launchers installed that will allow us to run our full 7 line spread.

Within the first twenty minutes our right rigger pops and the reel is clicking as soon as I can scream to keep the boat in gear and get on the rod our left rigger goes as well as the flat line with the Yozuri Bonita. We have three lines down and only three people in the boat so things are getting interesting. Me and my buddy start working rods as his brother clears the other unbitten line and jumps on the remaining line. In the excitement of things we didn’t do a very good job at timing because we all had our fish at the boat in the same damn time. I wish we would have had a camera rolling as it would have been great seeing three guys leadering gaffing and holding three rods. With how short the fights were we assumed they were just some bonitos but we were excited that we were near some fish. Welp we are all high fives as the first balckfin comes over the side then the second. The third fish ended up being a big Bonita but we were so happy we put ourselves on two good blackfins that we didn’t care.

We trolled for another hour and a half and my buddies brother in law decided he was ready to turn her back to home so he could go hang with his baby on the beach. We brought all lines in at noon and off to the races in a following sea all the way home. I slept the whole ride in catching up on the sleep that the rest of my crew got.

Only reservation for the fishing that day is that we stayed out and trolled a little longer and maybe tried fishing some different areas. I also had wanted to make one more stop to get our limit of triggers but my buddies brother was ready to go. It’s his dads boat so i ain’t complaining. If we had a full solid days of fishing we would have caught our trigger limit and dang near 20 beeliners I bet and probably gotten to play with fighting some reef donkeys but owell we were happy.

Our booty



I know I know I seem excited for a few bee liners and blackfins but you gotta realize this is our first few times doing this and it’s really rewarding when you put all of this effort in doing everything yourself and you have your hard work verified by catching some fish. Yeah we could have hired a captain and caught wayyy more fish by pulling up to his chicken coops and reefs but we did it on public numbers and spots that we ran over.

The rest of the weekend we spent drinking lots of beer eating lots of crawfish and rubbing elbows with some big boat captains and owners at a crawfish boil my buddies Dad hosted. I got to learn a lot from talking to some captains and got a few invites for the summer. Didn’t make anymore fishing trips this weekend as we were kinda on a. Schedule with parties and stuff but we are already starting our planning for our overnight trip coming up on Memorial Day weekend.

Tight lines.