Scott, Rick, John Billings, Jacob, Mike Luchak and I went out for a 4 day trip. Once again we had a rough start. A few hours into the trip, about 30 miles out, the generator started stumbling and shutting down. Changing the fuel filter did not fix the problem, so we had to turn around. Didn’t get back to the dock until after midnight, so we decided to wait till morning to tackle the problem. .
We assumed that we had a fuel delivery problem, so the next day we replaced the fuel pump, but that didn’t fix the problem. After a couple of hours in the engine room, Scott noticed that a small puddle in the pan under the generator pan was not oil, but was actually diesel fuel. He then found a brass fuel line fitting had vibrated against the edge of a stainless panel until it had worn a small hole which was allowing air into the fuel line. A quick trip to the hardware store and the problem was fixed. We headed out again about 2pm on Friday.
We arrived at McGrail Bank at dawn on Saturday and started fishing. Picked up a few grouper and snapper, and finally at at one of my special spots had a quad hookup on sow snapper. Unfortunately a pair of porpoise’s showed up and began trying to steal every fish we reeled in.
About noon we moved offshore to do some deep dropping. Had very quick success on tiles, yellowedge, and barrellfish. Caught a 20lb barrelfish, along with a yellowfin aulopus, which should both be new state records. We tried swordfishing for a couple of hours, but no success. Hit McGrail bank again just before dark and finished out our snapper limits without the porpoise intervention.
Mike Luchak put together the following video of our trip… The underwater video of deep dropping is pretty impressive.