This was the first trip of the season for the Possession Limit, and after missing two flat weekends due to other commitments, I was not inclined to let a 4’ wave height forecast stand in the way of testing the new watermaker. Even though the forecast showed some relatively large wave heights, I noted that the wind velocities were consistently below 10 knots and the wave periods were a couple of seconds longer than usual. This told me that the we might find big swells and little chop. As it turned out, that’s exactly what we had… the curtains never even picked up a single drop of salt spray the entire trip.
The crew this week were all bluewater veterans… three even have captains licenses: Rick Gaido (Snowy Grouper SRH), Larry Fincher, Scott Smith(Squirrelfish SRH), and Randall Buchanan. After a quick run to Arlan’s to get steaks for the two who forgot that mandatory and explicitly documented requirement, we departed the dock at 2:45pm Thursday. One of the upgrades for this year is adding a video feed from the Garmin 5212 to the new LED TV in the salon. This proved to be more than a cosmetic upgrade… If I needed to visit in the salon for a few minutes, I could still keep an eye on the radar screen. While in the cockpit, the crew could even watch the depth and bottom contours they were fishing through the salon windows. Keep in mind that the boat with the most toys wins… and I am trying to keep the Possession Limit in contention. As the sun dropped to the horizon, we enjoyed smooth seas and fried chicken.
First stop was the Picket Fence area. We enjoyed fresh coffee as the autopilot steered us the last couple of miles to the drop site. The first couple of fish to join us in the cockpit were of a species whose name begins with the letter A… need I say more. I had a pretty extensive list of spots routed out, so we began trying other locations to pinpoint where the best fishing was located… and it does vary from year to year. Before long the usual assortment of grouper began to fill the cooler. At one spot, we had a quadruple hookup on brought up 5 keeper snapper (half our limit). At that point, RickG spotted a very large dorsal fin breaking the surface about 300 feet from the boat. It was a large whale shark about 30 feet long and it seemed to enjoy swimming right under the boat…
Before too long Randall was showing all of us how to catch sow snapper and how to perform oral surgery on such.
As usual, Larry insisted on catching the biggest grouper and the only Warsaw allowed on the boat. However RickG has no problem allowing pictures being taken with him holding the fish so as to give the impression he actually caught something.
One thing that all of the Possession Limit crew members need to note is the reel that Scott was using this trip. This is an electric reel which is not much larger than our toriums. This picture shows Scott winching up a barrelfish as evidenced by the bend in the rod. This reel is a Diawa Seaborg 500fe Power Assist reel, which sells for about $630. His has it spooled with 1500 feet of 40# PowerPro so it has plenty of depth range and power for deep dropping. You can either use the handle as though it is a conventional reel, or you can let it do the winding for you. The batteries which are sold by Diawa are pretty expensive, however note the red fanny pack Scott is wearing. He went to Academy, picked up a deer feeder battery for under $20 and put in the fanny pack. The battery cable then plugs into the bottom of the reel, and he is free to roam around the cockpit. He used the reel all day for bottom fishing and still had plenty of juice left. It mounts on any regular rod and provides you with a digital display showing how deep you are and how far from the bottom you are fishing. After seeing how well this reel performed, and knowing how much deep dropping we will be doing this year, all of you should consider getting one of these.
After we had our limit of snapper and good box of grouper, we trolled over to one of my deep drop spots and put Scott’s reel to the test. Unfortunately for the rest of the crew, the reel of choice was a Torium 20, but Larry still managed to a crank a nice yellowedge to the surface. The line broke just as we were lifting him into the boat, but he floated long enough for us to get a gaff out. We also boated a couple of barrelfish, queen snapper, and a new species of tilefish.
After wearing the crew out deep dropping, we began the troll out to our tuna hotel. One Barracuda was the only thrill we had trolling, but when we got to the tuna spot, we picked up one YFT on the diamond jigs, plenty of nice BFT on diamond jigs and chunks, another YFT on the chunks, and lost a third YFT. We had only been to the rig for an hour so the YFT bite was looking ok, but then it shut down till midnight when we began working our way onshore.
I decided to head west for a little exploration Saturday morning near Peanut Rock, but the bite was slow. We did manage a few more yellowedge grouper and by the end of the day we had counted 19 grouper in the cooler, just one shy of a limit. We had no bites trolling most all day saturday… I suspect the full moon was hurting the bite.
The best thing on Saturday was a fresh batch of mango ceviche and Randall’s steaks. Our final snapper of the trip was obviously lost as it came from 400′ on a rock surrounded by 1000′ plus.
The new watermaker performed quite well, and this crew certainly put it to the test.. I ended up having to refill the tanks twice, about 150gal. We had one equipment failure… my port engine battery had a cell short circuit, causing a mess in the battery trays and a little low voltage on the electronics. It will be fixed in short order.
All in all, a pretty good start to the season, but next weekend is cleary a blowout with Hurricane Alex in the gulf and buoyweather forecasting 20 foot seas on Thursday and Friday.
Till next trip…
Capt. Stout