Took the boat out Sunday for a lazy day on the water w/ no hurries or worries! It was just the wife and I and we did not feel like going to Big Lake so we wanted to do something different. The seas were one foot and we decided to run out of FWC for specks, ling, tripletail, or whatever else we could find.
First stop at Verm 31, had great trout green water, but the current was ripping so hard that we could not get the bait to the bottom. Been there, done that, let's roll! We ran north to the beach since the NE wind was light and the water was so calm. Found a huge school of birds chasing shrimp and they were everywhere! Unfortunately, the school held gafftops and huge reds. Played with those for an hour or so looking for a hole that may have a few trout in them, w/ no luck. Decided to run offshore and go play in deeper water - what a treat. I was able to get my bride on her first ling, got some pretty neat pics of a lifejacket apparently left over from the Mariner incident last week, and it was absolutely stupid how many snapper harrassed us!
The red snapper hit every bait we threw looking for ling and some of them were HAMMERS! I actually hooked the biggest dang ladyfish I have ever seen (about 26-28" long) and got it to the boat when it was eaten by a 20lb red snapper in 60' of water. Shortly after that, the whole water around the boat was surrounded by nothing but snapper. This was at every platform we hit. Ended the day with one nice ling in the box, and some burned up tackle - caught sharks, trigger fish, gafftops, snapper, bull reds, and ladyfish. All on artificial and it was fun! For those of you that did not know, the road to FWC still has one section that has not been paved, I was told it was paved, but it is not 100%, which is not good to see when you are pulling a new boat! LOL!!!
The lifejacket actually held 3 baby tripletail under it, so we left it for them to grow under w/o getting eaten themselves. It was 28 miles south of FWC. Check out the pics, you can see the "MEI" handwritten label on it which is Mariner's initials.