Robin's Reports

BUOY, WHAT A DAY!! - hunt for mysterious tripletails.

It was our intentions to have a quick couple hrs on the ocean to hunt for tripletails and then be back in for lunch.

Well, there was no debris on the beach. There was no debris a couple miles off the beach, so we found buoy #2 out in the middle of nowhere and decided to look under it for a tripletail.

We saw a few barracuda and Jack got one nibble. "Nobody home."

Buoy #2 is one of the furthest buoys at our port.

I did happen to see a small school of kings chasing baitfish just north of here.

Approaching Buoy #3 with tripletail still on the brain.

There is much anticipation of seeing either a tripletail or a barracuda.

Well, I guess there is nobody here but toothy barracudas. Might as well move on to the next buoy.

If you can count, you can probably guess that our next buoy was #4 and you'd be right.

Nobody here either. We are seeing some small number of baitfish.

Here we are at #5. We are greeted by.....guess what?......... barracuda. Right.

I just knew you'd want to see the actual buoy. We hung around here for a while because Jack and I were pretty certain that we saw a "doormat"-sized tripletail that popped out for just a brief second. I'm sure that fish was pushing close to 20 lbs. We tried and tried but gave up and went to..........

I bet you thought it was going to be buoy #6. Well, it was busy with other folks so we basically headed in to the jetty area to use up our shrimp.

Here is Jack trying to not lose his gear in the rocks and yet come home with a delicious Sheepshead fish. (We've given up on Tripletail at this point.)

We were interrupted by this guy & his gal who slid right between us and the rocks (not quite yet in the photo). We worked hard to not yell at them and so we went to the other side of the rocks. Guess who showed up over there too? The dummy pinned us between the rocks and the pier with his boating skills. We had a few hair-raising moments of reversing to fight the current and get away from him. It is really hard to fight obstacles an incoming tide with a big boat like ours, which is lacking in maneuverability. Finally, I guess he'd pushed our buttons enough and left before we said something to them.

We we're coming into the inlet, we tried a couple more casts toward the concrete walls, meant to host the tugs & tankers. Low and behold, what comes our way????

The mysterious tripletail that is suppose to be sitting outside the port.

Another big one, also pushing near 20 lbs. Jack cast to him and tagged the shrimp on his nose. He popped back up and Jack cast again. He was interested and then changed his mind.

We lost it a couple more times and then found it again crossing the channel and again, interested, but not biting. We could see that it did have a smaller triple under the bigger one. Anyhow, we refound it a 3rd or 4th time, again crossing the channel to the original side. Nothing. Nada. Would take a shrimp to save our skunk of a day.

Oh well.... off to Rusty's for a late 2pm lunch. We were starving. I had the clams and Jack had the shrimp.

Here is a picture I took of us going over the Indian River bridge. Our house is in the far, far distance (red). We're not on the water but only 1-2 miles from the Indian River. The VAB bldg for the space shuttle would be to the far right (out of the picture). This is the view looking northward.

Happy Fishing..... I've got to go wash the skunk off of me.

Robin