Saturday, Nov. 10th aboard Shawnodese
Decided I’d try to swing an early morning trip out to check on the triggerfish bite before the Alabama game last Saturday. I got Kevin Kirby, aka Dualsport, his daughter Krystle, his other daughter’s boyfriend Robert and my old fishing pardna Gary Gates to come along for some string stretching.
Plan was to meet up at my place around 4:30 am and head out so we could get back before the 11:30 am kick off of the Bama / Mississippi State game. Well, I awoke bright and early at 4:38 am to Kev’s incessant knocking on my front door. Hhhmm, I musta been hammering the snooze button in my sleep. Kev and his crew had most everything loaded into Shawnodese by the time I got some clothes on and made it out of the door on the front porch. There was no sign of Gary, so I thought maybe he’d at least have the decency to be late to save me some face. No sooner than I had completed that thought the phone rang and it was the G-man himself, wondering where everyone was and why we weren’t down at the charter boat with him. Guess he thought we were goin’ in the big boat. That also was no biggie since I only live four minutes from the charter boat. Gary arrived and we all loaded into the Tundra and made the 0.8 mile ride to Billy Goat Hole. There were only a handful of trailers parked there, which seemed odd considering the great forecast of N to NW winds 5 to 10 knots and 1 foot or less seas I’d seen predicted all week by the weather guessers over at NOAA. It was all good. Backed the boat in, fired it up and had the primo parking spot.
I suppose the super early hours didn’t sit well with my, shall we say, morning constitution. Not to worry, there are brand new rest room facilities right there at the boat ramp. Guess what? They are locked up tight at 5:20 am on Saturday. It was at that point that I was truly overjoyed that I live less than a mile from said locked up rest rooms.
After the trip back to the house, I was FINALLY ready to head into what was supposed to be flat calm seas. We rounded Fort Gaines before the sun had gotten up and watched as it peaked out from behind the clouds as we approached Sand Island Lighthouse. It was a delightful pinkish orange, and we all admired the wonderful work God had done in making such a beautiful image for us to behold. Then the first in a long series of “1 foot or less” waves slammed into the starboard hull and drenched the lot of us. Apparently NOAA uses a different scale for their wave height predictions than I do, not to mention they completely flip-flopped the whole north/south thing. Once past the sand bar west of the light house, it was a steady parade of 2 foot washing machine water with a 3 footer thrown in to get you off of you rhythm. It wouldn’t have been too bad if the wave period wasn’t like 1.5 seconds. And the predicted N to NW winds were all coming out of the SW west at a good 13 knots.
We sloshed through the slop around 14 to 16 knots to our first stop. Fortunately for me, the fish were there. See, Kev, Krystle and Robert were pretty much drenched. Gary had on enough foul weather gear to withstand a hurricane and I could hide behind the center console whenever the spray was covering the boat. At least it was somewhat, kinda warmish, and the fish were biting decently. To start it was a steady bite of triggerfish, but, around 7:28, the red snapper woke up and were hungry. You couldn’t keep the baits down without catching some really nice snapper, so, we slogged on to another spot. Now, this place was only 1/2 nm from where we were doing pretty well on the triggers, but, we didn’t catch anything but snapper there. We made a couple of more stops with the same results, nice snapper. Since the seas were definitely not 1 foot or less, my rather optimistic number of stops got whittled down dramatically.
Seeing as how we were we were close by, I checked out the Anderson. Man, it is holding some nice red snapper. Oh yea, and one gag grouper with an affinity for Popeye’s fried chicken. What’s that you say cap’n D? Yep, you heard me correctly. See, Kev had brought with him a box of Popeye’s spicy fried chicken. The crew was munching on it as we slowly rode from spot to spot. Krystle wasn’t crazy about the spicy version of their chicken so Kev decided he’d see what the fish thought of it. He put squid on the top hook and Popeye’s on the bottom. First drop on the Anderson and he was doubled over. A nice red snapper took the squid and an undersized gag grouper ate the spicy chicken. There is a picture of those fish if Kev sends them to me or posts them up himself.
We kept moseying to the west and hit a few more spots. Caught a tagged trigger fish on one spot and put a couple of nice triggers in from an army tank. I think I had about 18 stops planned, but, around 9:45 I called it and we headed in to catch the Alabama game.
We got back to my place about 10:45 and iced the catch and knocked back a cold one or ten. Sussi-Q grilled up some burgers and we watched Mississippi State’s new quarter back, John Parker Wilson complete a sweet 100 yard touchdown toss and iced the defeat with another great pass later in the game. Gary and I went up to the charter boat to use the cleaning table to get the goodies off of the critters that made the ride in with us. Final tally was 15 triggerfish, 4 beeliners and a lane snapper. Not to bad considering it was a roughly 4 hour trip. Seeing as how cruddy John Parker played for us, and how well he did for Miss. State, I wish we had stayed out and fished longer.
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stay between us!!
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