NOT WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT

ABOUT THE TRIP

When you spend as much time on the water as we do, you begin to get the feeling that you know how a day is going to go before the trip starts.  Generally, we meet the clients pretty early in the morning and have a chance to get to know them a little bit while we show them around the boat.  By and large our clients are friendly, reasonable people who are a little apprehensive about the day ahead, especially if they are new to offshore fishing.

It is at this time that our confidence takes over and we provide our friends with some comforting thoughts about what they will experience over the next several hours; what the weather and seas will be like, how far offshore we will go and the types of fish we are likely to encounter.  And of course, when we will return to the dock under the theory that even the most apprehensive person can convince themselves that they can put up with almost any situation for a limited period of time.

Then the unexpected happens.  One recent trip, before which we assured everyone that grouper and snapper on the bottom were going to provide most of the excitement for the day, we were reminded of the fact that we are much better historians than fortune tellers.  The bite on the bottom was just ok.  Some grouper, some snapper and undoubtedly some grunts.  The flat line was on a bobber behind the boat where it should have been, and then it wasn’t.  The bobber moved right up even with the boat about 10 feet off of the port side with a big fish right beneath it.  The fish dropped the bait as I reeled in the slack line.  So I dropped the bait right back in the water and the fish took it …. at about 40 miles per hour.  I could tell from the angle of the line off the rod tip that the fish had run about 30 yards from the boat.  And before I could hand the rod to my client, the fished jumped over the boat.  If someone had been standing on the deck by the bow, he or she would have been hit by the fish as it cleared the port side and landed about mid-ship on the starboard side.  I was actually reeling up line that was on the left side of the boat while the fish was running away from us on the right side of the boat.  Not what I expected.

The fight was on and our client did a great job as he spent about 15 minutes trying to land a five-foot barracuda that could hold his own with any flying fish.  He landed the fish, we got some cool pictures, let the fish go, and I spent the rest of the day sheepishly admitting that, in spite of all of my confident pre-trip talk, I can accurately describe the events of a trip only after it is over.

LESSONS LEARNED

Prepare for what is possible, not just what is likely.  While most of your preparations should be made with a reasonably likely scenario in mind, it’s the little things that you do to accommodate the less likely events that can result in a great story at the end of the day.  If we focused only on bottom fish that day, there would not have been a flatline in the water.  And if the flatline had been rigged for a more likely bonita, the leader would not have been wire and we would not have a great story and some really cool pictures of a barracuda at the end of the day.

ON THE HORIZON

For some reason, we have begun catching a lot more and larger barracuda lately.  Hopefully good fishery management, responsible anglers and the absence of red tide this year bodes well for the number big fish encounters we will have this spring.