Had a long range trip scheduled for Wednesday-Sunday with Scott, John and Jacob Billings, and Brent Julliert, but work conflicts, and a summer cold front forced a reschedule for Thursday-Sunday. Thursday morning, another monkey wrench came up due to malfunctioning A/C the unit and an unfavorable offshore forecast. But by Thursday afternoon, the A/C was running, and buoyweather/windfinder offshore forecasts started looking a whole lot better so we decided to make a late departure instead of delaying an extra day. We left the Yacht Basin about 7pm and found that the seas had dropped from 4’ earlier to only about 2.5’ with no whitecaps. However, they were extremely close together which made for a wet ride. We fully expected conditions to get even better the further offshore we ran. That expectation was not met as the winds picked up and the seas got higher as the miles ticked off the distance to destination display.
Due to the late start, we didn’t make it to the first drop, RZ0004, until about 10:30am. On my first drop using my favorite glow grubtail I immediately latched on to a 10lb snapper. My next drop produced a 10lb yellowmouth, and my third drop another keeper snapper. Jacob picked up a 16lb sow and John B got a couple of red porgies. After the bite slowed at this spot, we headed to other spots on Rezak, but none were as productive.
The winds started out just under 15 kts which made it difficult to position the boat and drop 350’, but by 1pm, they were gusting north of 15 and it became almost impossible to bottom fish. We made the decision to head further offshore and try deep dropping, but by then the winds were a solid 15-20kts and we could not keep the boat from blowing so fast as to make deep dropping impractical.
With seas building and lots of whitecaps, we elected to call it a day and take advantage of running downsea all the way back to Galveston. That made for a fairly pleasant ride back. Arrived at the dock about 7:30am on Saturday. I checked the historical buoy data from nearby stations and it looked like we made the right decsion by coming home early.
Final count was 8 snapper, 1 grouper and 2 porgies. We can only hope that the forecasts are a little more accurate next weekend.