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..."