So, what about this trip?
Though every trip provides a unique set of experiences, there are common themes.
We always catch fish, see beautiful birds, and survive a storm. There are always plenty of pictures of fish, few of birds, and practically none of the storms. We are generally very busyholding down the cover during the storms. This first release won't have any bird photos, as all I know of were taken with my camcorder. I will extract some still shots from the video for sure. But, I haven't done any work on that yet. I will experiment with placing video clips on the site. We'll see.
So, here are some highlights.
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Some years
we catch a lot of 'beach trout' around the camp. The past two years
have been particularly productive there. This year there were few fish
around camp, so we headed toward the gulf to fish around oil & gas
rigs. There we caught more larger redfish than we ever have before.
This was one of our regular stops.
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Kenny &
Randall are showing the standard catch. Most of these redfish were within
a couple of pounds of each other, maybe 8-10 lbs.
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We normally
catch a few ling (lemonfish, or cobia). This trip was no exception.
Dick caught this one, which is probably the biggest I have ever seen
caught. However, the rumor is that Kenny 'hooked' one much bigger than
this one last year. It released itself.
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My guess
is that Kenny hooked a much larger relative of this jack cravelle last
year and wished it into a ling.
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We were
tied off to the back of Bob's boat fishing for redfish when I hooked
the largest fish of the trip. We eventually cut loose and the fish drug
us around for a while until it sucked on to the bottom and the line
finally snapped. It was most certainly a ray.
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Often one
of us would start catching fish and invite the other to participate.
So, this was a normal sight, looking at the other boat catching fish.
There were so many redfish that it wasn't unusual to see multiple hook-ups
at the same time.
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Here's
Andrew holding up a really nice one.
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At the
farthest rigs that we visited, a few small grouper were caught. Only
one of the bunch was legal size which is 20 inches. Compare these to
fishing in Port St. Joe
from Bob's boat.
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The weather
was very good for us this year. Not nearly as hot as usual with very
regular breezes. We did have one bad storm, however. You can see it
coming on us in the background of this picture.
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When we
turned around, this was our route back to camp. It was terrible! Neither
of us could see our instruments very well and each wave turned us in
a different direction. Lightning was striking all around us. I was quite
nervous.
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That beautiful
camp you saw on the first page was in this shape when we finally got
through the storm. The canope was blown on top of my tent damaging two
of the support poles and all the corner canope fixtures.
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We did
have quite a mess to clean up, but the canope was rendered unusable.
We patched the tent supports and in very short order.........
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..... we
were back in business.
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Most pictures
are showing off the catch. This represents one boat's kept fish for
the day's trip to the rigs.
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Here's
Kenny hauling in the entire string.
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We haul
them ashore to the cleaning table which is usually constructed of found
material.
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They couldn't
hold these up long!
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Richard,
Kenny & Randall cleaning.
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Darly,
Dick & me.
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After cleaning
the fish it's time to relax, discuss today's successes and .........
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... tomorrow's
possibilities.
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Sooner
or later it's time to start working on dinner.
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Sunset
is a most beautiful time!
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At the
end of the day, it's dinner time. Tonight it's.....
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... grilled
steaks.
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Another,
it's fish & hushpuppies.
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It's a
night.
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Next year....
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