Hey guys; been a while.
Went out trolling for phins Friday 5-3. Left Chapin at 0115 only to get 30 minutes from the house and realize we left the bait in the freezer. Great way to start the morning!
Put in at Remleys slightly before 6 with a friend of mines 24 Albemarle, later than we wanted of course.
Nice ride out, the old Albe cruises around 26 knots. We set the throttle and let her glide through the seas. Saw some life in 100-150’ scattered weeds and plenty of flying fish; figured this was too shallow this early in the year. So we rode and rode and rode at 26 knots; sure would be nice to have a Freeman and run 60!! Ain’t in everyone’s cards though. Finally at 1400’ we decided we had gone too far and still haven’t seen the life like we did back in 150’. We found a small temp break and set out our spread and inched our way back to shallower waters.
350-400 we saw some life and lots of boats. 
We made our way into a trolling pattern following some broken weed lines. Lots of radio chatter; about not catching fish.
Luckily;;; we trolled past a log, all of a sudden baaammm zzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzz zzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzz
4 fish on. 4 men on the boat; 3 fish landed. Of course I lost mine, heard about that all day. I let a little slack in the line; trying to avoid a tangle and here we go.
We trolled another hour or so and only had one other fish hit the spread. I did manage to get that one in the boat. Redemption.
We called the trolling off around 2 and decided to look for some bottom dwellers between 120’ and 90’. I caught 2 gags, both short, 20” and 16”. Sent them both back down to the depths with the seaqualizer. Hopefully they’ll forget about that sudden ride to the light and bite a hook again.
We caught several b-liners in a variety of sizes. We kept about 15. Landed 1 trigger and some grunts and porgies. More ring tails than I care to count.
All in all it was a fantastic day. There is nothing I’d rather see than that big ole sunrise on an open ocean. I didn’t make it offshore any last year so I was so grateful for the invite this year. On a side note: I have bought me another SeaCraft. This time it’s a 25 Seafari. I’m just not ready to take her offshore yet. We will build some confidence on Lake Murray for now.
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Carolina Gold*
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awesome. i’m headed out sunday. hopefully i’ll have a story to tell…
How’d yall do? Season seems slow so far. Hopefully we will get back out soon. Gotta get back out before they close the gags down.
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