Good Friends have Good Fishing

Saturday Aug. 23, 2008

The weather was all rain and lightning early in the week and it made me nervous that the plans might get scrubbed but low and behold, I found myself looking at the sky friday and thinking how nice it must be for Woody, eric, and Chris down on the coast.
I shagged down to Surfside Friday night. when I arrived I found that the afternoon's whiskey fueled fires had subsided and the boys were enjoying the amenities at the Anchor Inn.
This place in Surfside is far from a five star resort, in fact I found it impossible to find any single thing about the hotel that was even as good as 'unacceptable'
Most notably the odor. Anyway, We woke up well before the sun and after a stop to gather a couple cups of coffee we were soon loading Capt. Chris Farley's boat.
This is the same captain we ran offshore with earlier when the seas were rough. We had none of the same type of issues this time out. The ride was smooth enough that
we could enjoy our beverages easily while Sitting in a bean bag skipping across the nearly smooth surface of the Gulf of mexico. In fact, Capt. Chris would later remark that we didn't see a wave over 2 ft. all day.
The upshot of the smooth water was that we were able to run fast out to the hot spots the captain had in mind. Less than two hours later we cut the engines and started trolling for kingfish and it didn't take long for the fish to play along.
This early morning fishing was one of the multitude of highlights of the day. I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to run a trolling jig with a sardine behind the boat but it got even better when Eric fought in his first kingfish ever. The good times and good fishing had
everyone in high spirits especially myself. Everyone in the boat was cleaning up at this fishin' hole, except me. Woody was lucky enough to get hooked up with a nice amber jack was gaffed into the boat very early in the day.

Eric caught an extremely large kingfish, the largest I've ever personally seen caught. All good things must come to an end and the excellent fishing at this spot stopped. We hit a couple other honey holes where we trolled for kings. Even if I was the butt of the joke, it was fun to be ribbed constantly about being unable to catch a kingfish, Luckily I finally put a kingfish in the boat about this time.Woody proved that he had some sort of Zen connection with the Red Snapper, hooking them up constantly.

Chris Z. and myself adapted the “do exactly what woody does” fishing method to hook a couple red snapper also, unfortunately Red Snapper in federal waters are off limits now so some very large delicious fish got sent back into the dark blue water. We had a limit of kingfish when we started headed back inshore.

During the ride in Alan demonstrated his offshore skills, spotting weed mats for us to fish around. Trolling around a weed line approx. 25miles offshore we were surprised to hook up with a wahoo.

We tried to troll up some Dorado but they proved to be much more catchable with a small treble hook and a hunk of squid. We fished several weed lines with the small treble hook rigs. The fishing was hot and heavy since the school of fish would stay active and near the boat so long as one of the hooked Dorado was kept in the water until his colleague could be hooked.
We made one final stop in Texas Waters to pull some legal Red Snapper in before heading for the fish cleaning table where we got lots of helpful fish cleaning tips from the old guy who runs the Fish Cleaning Service that we declined.

All in All I feel like Saturday we may well have had the type of fishing that that lead to Capt. Chris telling his clients on Sunday " You Should have been here yesterday..."

Backyard Terror

An interesting occurrence occurred the other day, since things have been slow here on the page, and at the behesting of Mr. Woody, here it is:

I walked out the back door to have a smoke with my coffee, not feeling blood thirsty, or at least not excessively so, just the standard means that naturally occur: the baseline. I looked and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a squirrel in my wood pile. Honestly, it was a squirrel; this is no twisted metaphor that needs further explanation. He kicked up his little squirrel heels and began running at the sight of me lighting my smoke, I thought nothing of it, then the blood lust rose from nowhere, I looked in my hand and there was my weapon, albeit a nontraditional weapon, but a weapon just as much; a blue childproof Bic lighter. Quick as a whistle I reared back and let it fly with all my might, well much of my might anyway. The old days of rodeo and nurse meeting have left me cautious about when I use all my might in a throw. Shoulders ain’t what they once were, and a few rounds of “dent the barn with a testicle” leaves me feeling about like I did serious hand to hand with a Wookie. For those of you who don’t know Wookies are notorious for pulling folks shoulders out of joint during hand to hand combat. So anyway, I threw that blue Bic lighter with much of my might, and to my surprise, I centered it up on that squirrel and rolled him. Caught him where the neck meets the shoulders.

I stood there for a moment, astonished. As I walked over to collect my kill, I reached for my trusty yeller knife, a constant companion, only to discover it wasn’t in my pocket. There was a good reason for this, being as I had only recently woken up, I was not wearing pants, just underpants, and my underpants don’t have pockets, hence: no knife. Being as I was nearly half way to my quarry, I decides to collect him and give him a lookie see, being as this was my first Bic-kill and all. Figured I’d throw him on top of the grill, finish my smoke, slip inside and grab my knife and then skin out my fresh breakfast. Well that what I figured anyways.

So I collected him, picked him up by the tail, now bear with me as I feel the grip is noteworthy. If you were to make a hitch hiking (or Aggie approval) gesture with your right hand, go ahead, you can do it while reading…I’ll wait. So squirrel tail pointing down, running through the palm of the hand, squirrel oriented so if you had a longer thumb, you could place it right square on the critters bung hole. I noticed he was a juvenile, thank you Dr. Honeycut. Now raise your hand up to your face as though you were looking, closely inspecting, wondering why there was no blood leaking from the ears, nose, or mouth. At this point I should have taken nature’s cues and backed away slowly before the wrath was unleashed. I didn’t; ever the inquisitive type, I inspected closer. In hind sight, I believe this was the exact moment things got western.

So as I’m sure you may have guessed, the squirrel regained his ghost, and with vigor. He went freakin’ wild in spades. I was able only to control my coarse motor skills, for some reason, the fine ones that open the hand failed me. I did what anyone would do when suddenly confronted face to face with a formerly concussed, recently westernized squirrel…I ran. Unfortunately I ran with the squirrel still in my grip, it was all happening too fast to correctly register in my still groggy, un-caffeinated, and only marginally nicotined brain. I was operating in the fight or flight, reptile portion of my grey matter and realized something about myself I had never known before: I’m apparently terrified of squirrels. I screamed, then my scream scared me even more because it was the primordial scream they talk about on Shark Week. Yea, the type where the girl is swimming along side the boat and gets attacked by a 14 ft tiger shark. No, not the first scream that follows the curiosity bump, and not the next one where teeth meet bone, but the following one, the one where she has been drug under into the briny deep and comes to the complete realization of the entire impact of the situation. Yea, that scream when she breaks the surface, that’s what I heard…chilled my blood.

So the squirrel is screaming at me, like an over anxious little kid blowing on a squirrel whistle for the first time, running circles around my hand by the short leash dictated by my death grip on its tail, clawing my arm with each lap. I’m running slightly larger circles in my underpants, slinging coffee all over the back yard, extinguished cigarette hanging from my lip, flailing my arms like I’m covered with invisible spiders, one empty cup of coffee in one hand, one wildly pissed off squirrel in the other, screaming like a shark attack victim. Musta looked like some primitive rain dance or a whole hearted attempt at unpowered flight, wish it was someone else; I really would have liked to watch the situation escalate. However it was me, I was terrified, and it was horrible.

After the third lap around the yard, a sudden calm fell over me: I realized I had met my maker, this was the end of me. I had fought the good fight and was bested. I accepted my demise, apparently relaxing my grip. The squirrel pulled free of my hand, ran up my arm, presumably to give the “coups de grace” in the form of a neck bite to sever my jugular. Instead, he jumped on my head and ran down my other still flailing arm and, with impeccable timing, at the height of my flail zenith was catapulted to a tree and then jumped to the house. He paused at the roof line and gave me another earful of some incomprehensible and perplexing gibberish I could only take to be a warning not to be throwing lighters at squirrels. I took his words to heart. Think I’m gonna quit smoking all together, just to avoid the temptation.

Sorry, no pictures.