Fishing on the "First Light" at Boca Grande! Guys trip was great fun. Fishing the Pass for tarpon during a tournament was CRAZY! The tournament rules were jigs only, and circle hooks, 2 rods per boat and when the fish broke water near the boat, 100 boats out of 300 would crash the zone! Video below.

BAIT:Chummed up bait and used the cast net for greenies, also bought shrimp which was very effective. Picked up some crabs in the drift in the cut.

Fishing on the flats was HOT! Trout frenzy, spot-tails, jacks, snook, and pin-fish bait steelers. Witnessed several tarpon caught during the tournament with fish rolling right at our boat, one fish tried to jump into another boat and slammed the side. Witnessed a Goliath Grouper caught and a couple of others hooked with the anglers just about jerked off into the water. We think one rod went down. ESPN or other video crews filmed the event, along with filming the tarpon tournament. What a ZOO. Went off-shore to fish wrecks in the afternoon Saturday. We had a fun time with spanish, grouper, snapper, pinfish, and squirel fish. I had probably hooked a small snapper when.... while I was cranking it up it was swallowed by a larger fish which promptly snapped the 50 lb line as I tried to keep it from going back to it's hole. So.... I put down a live pin fish and upped the tackle to 80# leader and braid and POW!!! another snapped off line as I tried to keep the monster from going back in the wreck. Guess what? I now went to 130# leader and 80# braid and a larger pin fish.... 2 minutes.... wait.... wait... now I hook up with the monster again only to thumb the drag and rip-up the 130# leader and POW... another one broken with the leader fraid completely... all 8 feet of it. Do you think this stopped us... NO!.... OK, the young one says, lets hook up two rods to the #130 leader and set her down with another pinfish.... The setup worked great.. drags were locked down and this fish wasn't going back in the hole. We waited and waited, but I guess the fish was full of pinfish and didn't like the looks of 2 lines. NO BITE! Maybe next time.

Fishing on the My Time Sunday. Left dock at 5:45 loaded for BEAR! 200 lbs of ice, frozen bait, 1000 lbs of tackle, and ran around South Beach looking for poggies. We search the beach of Hilton Head for over an hour looking for the schools to surface along with 10 other boats or so. We finally got lucky and caught a few cast net loads even though they were not on the surface and we were probably the first to leave the beach with bait at 7:30! Ran 60 miles or so to R-8 and had a blast with the vast selection of fish there. When we pulled up, there were blackfin tuna (30lb class), snapper, cobia, amberjack, cudas, cudas, cudas.. almost forgot, we had a large school of very large yellowtail snapper hovering under the boat. It's the first time ever I've seen them in these waters. The problem today was serious however. We had to go to light 50 lb line to get the bite, and when we did, they immediately ran into the tower and broke us off. Paul did land a nice cobia, we also beat a nice dolphin in the head with the gaff before we decided to give him one more hit in the head with the pole prior to "releasing" him and of course we caught several amberjack for exersize.

We then ran out another 10-14 miles to the Deli and hooked up on a couple of small dolphin right away, after that..... nada. Came back to R-8 and trolled around the perimeter after picking up many cudas near the tower and had a nice wahoo on for a brief amount of time before the hooked pulled. Had a sail jump nearby and then ran back in to R-7 where we had "Bow practice" 101 without any targets. The fish seemed to understand as soon as the first arrow went in the water. Fish are rather smart about arrows.

Final meat catch: 1 cobia, 1 dolphin.

Today was beautiful on the water, great time with the crew; the breakoffs and fish just didn't cooperater.

Fished on the Playin Thru yesterday for the "Food and Beverage" Tournament F&B. It's an annual event which has been going on for many years now. Yesterday there were about 35 boats. The tournament is a king and cobia tournament. We did pretty well, but we missed the really big cobia, TWICE! We did land a nice one about 35 lbs, but it takes a 50 lb cobia to place well. We also landed about 6 nice kings. We were robbed of a win because at 5:10 a larger king was weighed in when the time tagging limit was announced at the captains meeting to be 5:00. Great day on the water and we were covered up with fish until about 2:00 at the Tire Reef! Some nice photos, eh?, as R-6 would say, "Our newest version of the pink". Too much over indulgement at this tourney as the cleaning crew at the end of the day was dysfunctional! HA!