Jun

You can’t win if you don’t play…

Frequent flier, Stroby and I had a couple of conversations leading up to todays trip. The forecast wan’t looking good. Winds gusting to 20 out of the south, heavy rain and possible thunderstorms. Couple that with the remnants of a full moon tide and it was going to be sloppy on the reefs. At 6 lastnight, we made the call to go for it. If the fishing hadn’t so damned good all week, we would have stayed home.

We were greeted with a colorful sunrise to the east and dark, ominous clouds to the west.

We got out to the first spot and dropped down into 30 feet of water, Bob hooked up immediately. Gotta love the instant skunk-be-gone! Bob’s fish was a big one and actually pulled the boat around for a bit. Normally we’d chase a bigger fish down to shorten up the fight for a safer release but Bob said he wanted to take one so he went toe to toe with it without my help. You can see how dark the sky is behind hime here… A quick check of the radar confirmed what we already knew…The rain wasn’t far off.

That was the last fish for a while. The tide had slacked and it was now pouring. We stuck it out in hopes of finding more fish on the ebb tide. We made the right call. It took 3 drifts to go from a standstill to 1.1 MPH. We were hooking up again. I hooked up next. This fish fought a lot bigger than it was. It was still a great bass, but I was thinking I had another 50 on the line for a minute.

Bob and i went back and forth hooking fish after fish. It seemed like every drift, one of us had a fish on. The tide was really cranking and we were drifting at 3 MPH and it was very hard to feel the bottom but the fish kept coming. Bob had another real nice fish during all of this…

We could hear the thunder coming. The wind was really picking up and the rain drops were getting big… But we were still hooking up. Just as we boated this fish, there was a flash of lighting that was a little too close. Bob scrambled for the camera, snapped a pic and we quickly got the boat ready for a high speed run back to the ramp. In no time we were doing 50 MPH and passing bigger charter boats like they were standing still. Of course once we got the boat back on the trailer, the storm passed and the rain all but stopped. Oh well… I’m glad we made the call to go. You can’t win if you don’t play!