Robin's Reports

FINALLY FISHING AGAIN!!!
by Robin

On Oct 10th, God calmed the seas, created nice weather and gave us a chance to get out and fish!!!

I don't have the pictures ready, but the short of it was that we did not get up at the crack of dawn. I think we may have gotten out to Pelican Flats about 9:30am, pulling right up to the ledge that we like to fish for a variety of reef fish. The anchor goes down, stinky dead shrimp go on the hook and everything goes down to the bottom.

Nibble, nibble.... pull.... reel, reel, reel and up comes a very nice Trigger fish that goes right into the cooler on the first drop.

Send everything back down with another stinky shrimp. Nibble, nibble,.... pull..... tug.... reel, reel, reel and up comes a nice Red Porgy, but it goes back to the ocean because it didn't meet the requirements, by law, for the cooler. Beautiful little guy.

(Sorry no pictures because I was catching everything.) By this time, my eldest has his rig ready and he sends down a stinky dead shrimp. Nibble, yank, pull, yank, wiggle, wiggle, yank... up com a huge red snapper, which is now illegal to keep. Vent & send it back down. We're all high-5-ing each other because we're in 78 ft of water. This means that the snapper population must be thriving with the 10 month closure.

Next couple drops produce a chocolate chip porgy and black sea bass. All very nice edible fish.

We decided to pull anchor and go to another spot, as to not overfish this one ledge.

We head east a little bit until we come across our known Grouper 'hump. We've pulled 25, 35, 40 lb Warsaw Grouper & a 62 lb Cobia off this area in the past. We've got high hopes.

Nibble, nibble, pull, reel, reel, reel screaming as line is peeled off. Oh, I'm so excited that I've got something nice on. Reel, reel, reel and....... it's a 4 ft shark. Infact, we all took turns pulling in 4 ft sharks.

Sadly, the rest of the day produced no other edible fish. We did see an incredible pod? school? gathering? flock? of jellyfish. AMAZING. Literally, there were hundreds, if not thousands in the area we were fishing for grouper. That may be why we never caught anything but sharks off the bottom.

We headed back home by 4pm and cleaned fish. We enjoyed a nice dinner of fried Porgy & Triggerfish, suggested by our youngest. He loves my version of Long Jonz Slivers. LOL.

Happy Fishing!! Pictures to come eventually on that day.