Last snapper trip for 2012

[Finfeatherfur]

After working Friday, and having a great supper w/ my wife Friday night, I got called to work my second job as a LEO. My wife was none too happy about that since she wanted to fish Saturday, but I convinced her it was too stormy to risk a snapper trip. To my surprise, Saturday was a great day to fish, too bad I got home at 5am, and was about as useful as a used up dish towel from being up 24 hours. I slept for 3 hours and then woke up to clear skies and we were going to make a trip, but things came up and we decided to wait for Sunday. So here it is, the last snapper report for 2012 for "Tighthole".

We left my house at 5am with my neighbor, David Hernandez and his father-n-law "Big L" Reagan of Egan. We stopped in Kaplan for our usual breakfast grab, and headed south to Rollover landing hoping to dodge the thunderstorms. We hit he gulf to find a nice 1' swell and were able to run 35mph crusing south to the snapper grounds. About 5 miles out, we find large mats of grass and we stopped to check them for tripletail. With the heavy clouds and low sun, it was too dark to see any so I told them lets go get our snapper and we will check the mats on the way back this afternoon. We arrived at the platform in 90' of water that we had the bruiser snapper at last weekend to find nothing wanting to play. This was David's first snapper trip and I wanted him to fight some good fish so we made several moves looking for big fish, but as luck would have it, we only found the small ones throwing back numerous 20" snapper after venting them. I then switched tactics and caught some live bait on sabiki rigs and things changed for the better! It was a hoot to watch everyone w/ rods bent in half while I worked the deck. Then, my favorite thing made an apperance, the first ling of the year. I had to entice him, but after a few passes, he finally ate my jig. I set the hook and he sounded ripping 100' of line from the Calcutta 400 in record time. I handed the rod to David so he can feel the difference in the fight. Several times he got the nice fish boatside, only to watch him strip off line like it was nothing. Finally, after a good fight, I got the fish gaffed and in the box.

We moved around looking for ling, but only found one other one that would not eat anything we threw at it. I tried all my little things I could think of, and it stayed around the boat for 20 minutes, but would only eat chum, nothing with a hook in it. So we ended up 1 for 2 on cobia and started in. We passed several nice grass patches on the way in, but didn't stop to check them for chicken dolphin since I wanted some tripletail, which is like crack to me. Unfortunately, the afternoon storms were in full force on the way in and we had to drive around a couple of them. By the time we got back to the large mats, we found them mostly broken up and the water was a little choppy. We were able to locate 2 nice tripletail, but we came up short on closing the deal. So we ended with a nice limit of snapper, one nice ling, a nice blacktip, and a small king that my guest wanted to keep. This was one of my best years ever for quality snapper, but one of the wierdest for weather. I made a total of 4 snapper trips and have enough to last the year for sure. Now, it's time to get back on the specks and tripletail!