A Road Trip to the Keys - Part 2
January 11-20, 2000
After unloading our gear, the first thing that we did was go around the Yankee Fleet and meet everyone. There were rumors of a blow coming our way. This did not sit well with me, but welcome to fishing, it's in Mother Nature's hands. You take your chances and sometimes you bite the dog...and sometimes the dog bites you! We chose our bunks, the bunks being a very important factor in a long range trip...it's called sleep. A decent nights' sleep (or whenever you have a chance to lay down your head) makes all the difference in your trip. The Yankee has good bunks, thank you God!
Anyway, off we went...Mike was psyched to get into a little bottom action...it had been a long trip to get here. I was hoping to film a little. The mates prepared the bait...we would be using ballyhoo. The Yankee shot off into the night to our first drop.
In about 5 hours we were fishing...and no sooner could you say "fish on" when I landed a nice 10 pound mutton snapper. Those little buggers put up a good fight. My brother Mark was losing fish left and right and Mike was having a hard time with the wrong species. The wind started to pick up. Mark was having a hard time detecting the bite. It was a very small nibble like a picky blackfish bite. From fishing with Al in Orient Point I knew this bite by heart, so when I felt the slight nibbling I pulled hard on the rod. One of my other tricks was using spectrum line.
Mark finally got the feel and drilled another 10 pounder. Now let's talk about what was coming in around us. A nice cobia came in along with some king mackerel, some nice grouper and a mess of mutton snapper. At this point I was thinking that this was going to be a smoking trip. The crew was buzzing around helping everyone. They are top knotch, all clean cut, you could have taken them out to dinner. The wind was beginning to howl and the seas were picking up.
At our next stop we started to see the sunrise and along with the sun came a ton of yellowtail. All you had to do was drop and pull. Some nice fish came up to 3 lbs. and then the waves began to splash over the bow. Time to go...
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