Picked up a childhood friend from the airport, and left the dock around 10 am. Raining but forecast was reasonable - 2 to 5, changing wind direction, up to 20kts. Edisto buoy was reading 1.64 every 4 seconds, NW 9.7 kts. So whats a little rain…
Fly thru the inlet, ocean was flat as a pancake - running 50+mph. Laughing, yes laughing. Well, it didnt last long. The seas were building and were steep - slowed down to under 30mph and hunkered down for a longer than normal ride out. We saw clean skys on the satellite weather, so we pushed on. A few hours later, we stuffed the bow and water came over the gunwale, soaking all of us. We were 20 miles away from the GT Hole. We stopped and had a cold beverage and discussed. Since it was still early, before noon, and the sun was shining, we decided to change drivers and push on - albeit slower and lifted the bow up high.
Alas, we made it to our numbers, put out the spread, and it was ON! In no time, we had three mahi in the box, two gaffers and one slinger. The down deep was hit, wahoo style, and it made quick work of our tackle and the line was cut?
And with an eye on the satellite weather, and the gray sky all around us, I was concerned. The storm was in GA and moving our way rapidly. With an anticipated three hour ride home, we were going to be in the midst of it.
One more troll through our numbers, just about every rod ended up a short strike or not converted into a boated fish. Being able to put my childhood friend on the fish, letting him reel all of them in and bring three fish home for supper was fine - our goals were accomplished. Fearing the storm, we left around 2pm.
The seas turned and we were taking them head on. We were running about 15 mph (a good speed for high speed trolling, not running home). ROUGH RIDE. About an hour later, and still 50 miles from home, we hailed Capt Robert of the New Inlet Princess - he was fishing the Parking Lot, and gave us a report of smooth seas at his locale.
We ran over some amazing bott