01 Jul 10 Fathom Lump

[Graceland]

Saw lots of familiar faces in the lot at Owl Creek and seemed like everyone was going to the fingers or the canyon. Jake had a good report from the weather bouy area on some larger sized BFT so we headed south, clearing the inlet at 4:30. Saw Nolan Agner on Knockdown inshore of us about daylight along with a center console and that was it. About 5 miles short of our mark we spot a big weedline and come off plane to check it out. We drop out a couple of lines and troll the edges. Had a couple of big boils on the baits but no hookups. As we make a turn to circle it again I notice what looked to be most of the Rudie charter fleet bearing down on us. I didn't want to be late to the party so we pulled in lines and got on down to the lump.

0630 Jake is dropping the shotgun back and immediately is hooked up on a big fish. The fight is on and I get the pleasure of sticking a 55 inch BFT. Nice hawg on the deck very first thing. We let him flop and bleed out on the deck and try to set the spread. We get two lines out this time and are hooked up again. This time it's a mahi. Try again to set the spread, get three lines out and get two hook ups. Another gaffer on one line and something big on the spreader bar. Kieffer gets to crank this one in, and I get to stick another good BFT, this one measured out at 49 inches. Well this scenario went on until about 7:30 when we finally managed to get a 12 line spread out. In that first hour we landed 2 BFT, 1 YFT and 5 mahis. After that nothing much happened, I guess we should have stuck with the 2 and 3 line spread. About 9:30 I mark some large fish at about 50 feet and call it out, 2 seconds later the planer goes off. The run lasted for about 10 seconds and then the line went slack. Silly fish ate the planer instead of the bait.

About 10:30 it sounded pretty dead other than a BFT here and there so we decided to go wreck hopping and listen to the radio in case the bite turned back on. We wreck hopped our way out and ended up with a limit of nice sea bass, most in the 4 lb range. We also got another gaffer. Poor guy just swam up to the boat lit up like a christmas tree. He immediately had three bottom rigs loaded with squid dropped in his face. [grin] Jake and I both had a couple of mystery bites that put a serious bend in the 50 class gear we were using, unfortunately they didn't stay hooked up.

Kieffer had never caught a tile so we took him on out to the deep to break him in on fishing in 300 feet of water. We only made a few drops and caught about a dozen small blue line tiles.

We had a beautiful ride in on calm seas and hit the dock at about 7:30 to weigh the BFT. We were hoping to get lucky on Jakes big one, but he only went 96 lbs. [sad]

All in all a good day fishing with plenty of meat in the boat. Jake has the pictures, and hopefully will post them up when he gets back in tonight.

[jbhockeyfan]

Sounds like a good trip and nice catch of fish. Looking forward to seeing the pics