The first trip for 2018. Scott Smith, Larry Fincher, Rick Gaido, John Billings, and Jacob Billing went out for a 4 day trip on Blue Sky. Things did not start smoothly because the high water alarm kept going off. After an inspection of the engine room, the cause turned out to be caused by the port shaft seal slinging water at cruising RPM. It would quit leaking at 1350RPM and below, so we simply slowed down and continued the trip. The morning bite at Rezak Bank was slow, but Larry caught two very large gag grouper. We also caught a couple of yellowmouth. No jumbo snappers, and we were throwing back most of the snappers we caught, which turned out to be a mistake. By mid morning the bite was completely dead.
At noon we began trolling out to Magnolia. Only caught one small barracuda while dragging baits. After dark we had trouble even jigging up blackfins for chunk bait, and didn’t hook a single YFT before giving up about midnight. Headed to an area east of Elvers bank and first thing the next morning dropped three times for swords.
A water spout formed up about a mile west of us and ended up passing within about 250 yds of the bow of the boat while we were swordfishing.
Had what appeared to be one bite, but did not hook up. After giving up on swords, we began deep dropping in the same general area and picked up about 4 tiles, 3 yellowedge, and a barrelfish. Even the deep drop bite was slow so we headed back west and tried snapper fishing at a couple of my old spots and the WC609 artifical reef with no success except for a couple of AJ hookups. We pointed the bow back to Galveston about dark and made it to the Galveston jetties about 8am.
We finished out the trip with a traditional serving of frozen margaritas, and started making plans for the next offshore excursion
Till then… Capt. Stout