Woke up at 3am only to see the buoy with 4.3’ @ 5 seconds. Wind still blowing at 16knts with gusts to 19knts, there was no sign of it laying down. No thanks on that. Sent out a text to delay. After a couple hours of discussion and looking at the buoy 187 times, I called off the trip.
My dad was in town and figured we would just take out the skiff. Unloaded all of the offshore stuff out of the truck, loaded inshore stuff, hooked up the skiff. I went back upstairs to get my lunch and checked the buoy once more… 3.6’ and wind at 12 knts. Then a crazy idea popped into my head. What if I were to UN-cancel my trip? So, I called the troops back and told them we were going offshore.
This was possibly my latest departure ever. Loaded the truck and headed to the marina. Loaded as quickly as possible and probably left the dock just before 8am. Once we got to the jetties, one of the twins started to lose mucho power. Couldn’t get her up over 3100 RPM. Well, I guess that is what you have 2 for. Ocean was a lot nicer at this point, we so pushed on at a whopping 19 knts (because of power loss, not because of ocean).
Finally dropped lines at 10:45AM on some scattered grass. It was tough fishing. We caught enough grass to feed an army of vegetarians. Long rigger, short rigger, any rigger, you name it. The grass was hungry. Didn’t matter what color or what position in the spread. It was hungry.
While we loaded the transom with grass, we also managed to pick up:
9 dolphin
1 tuna
1 girthy wahoo
Ocean was really nice all day for us, but knowing that we had some engine issues, we picked up at 2:45 after 4 hours of fishing and not push our luck any more.
Feel free to guess the weight and I will post at the end.
