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Fishing Report Adventures

Grandad's had the incredible opportunity to go fishing on Thursday 7/17/2008 with Gulf Coast Charters. On board were myself-Chris Newman (Grandad's Fishing Tackle), Tom Hilton (Hilton's Real-time Navigator), his 13 year old son Nick, boat owner Trace Adkins, and Stork and Greg with Redneck Adventures. The day started by meeting at the boat at 5:30am and we departed about 6:30am after getting everything loaded and looking at the Real-time Navigator to find the rip currents and temperature breaks. Well we didn't find good breaks but we were able to find a couple of rips that looked promising. We loaded up with ice and then pointed the 36'Contender to the ship channel and made 42knots out to the first stop (49 nautical miles) which was a rig to make bait. After about 15 min we had an acceptable number of 7"-10" blue runners and headed to the first rip located about 6 miles away.

Well it only had 12"-15" mahi-mahi so we headed to a snapper rock about 15 nautical miles away. When we got to the rock I grabbed my OTI 600 gram jigging rod which was topped off with OTI jigging line and had Grandads "Purple Banana" jig and as I dropped I asked Captain Eugene how deep the fish were. He said they were about 160' down in 175' of water. I counted the color changes in the jigging line and stopped at 150' and slowly jigged down about 10' as the others were getting bait on their hooks I hollered "FISH ON" and was rewarded a minute later with a 7lb red snapper. We got back on the rock and everyone dropped down. We had 5 out of 6 rods go down pretty quickly and I finished my 2 fish limit of red snapper with an 8lb fish. I put up my jigging outfit and grabbed my 7'6" OTI Spinner and tied on an 8" Grandads Smacker Mackerel swim-bait in case a cobia came around. The first one that came by wouldn't commit but the second charged the swim-bait but was cut short when the deckhand pitched a jig in between the fish and my swim-bait and it ate the jig. We put the 20lb cobia in the box and I handed my jigging outfit to Greg from Redneck Adventures who put 2 -10lb red snapper in the box on as many drops.

We then headed about 10 miles to a spot to catch amberjacks, locally known as "Reef Donkeys", to put as much hurt as possible on whoever wanted to catch one. I swapped jigs to the "Green Banana" and dropped down. It didn't take long before my rod bent over but even with 23lbs of drag I couldn't stop the big AJ's. I watched as Tom Hilton, Stork from Redneck Adventures, and Trace battled AJ's from 25lbs to 35lbs so I switched to live bait and combos with 30lbs+ of drag as they had. After getting back on the spot I asked how long to drop down for and Stork said "12 little monkeys" so I counted down "12 little monkeys" and didn't have to wait long before getting picked up. This fish was a real brute taking me nearly to the rail several times but the low gear on the 30W 2-speed reel proved to help me wench up the 35lb AJ after about 5 minutes. Then Nick decided he was man enough for an AJ and dropped down. He proved his ability and after a 10 minute battle had a nice 25lb AJ on the deck!

We discussed our next plan and opted to try for a grouper at a nearby rig but there were not any hungry ones home so we decided to try out a nearby shrimp boat to see if there were any blackfin tuna holding nearby. We got behind the shrimper and made a few casts and I saw bonito down deep then a few blackfin tuna showed up in the mix. We tied up to the shrimp boat and started chumming. I pitched a chunk of blue runner to a blackfin but a bonito slipped in and stole it! I put him in the boat for fresh chunks and we kept at it. Tom and Nick proved to be the only ones for the day able to land any tuna which were both about 20lbs. The current made it difficult to hold the fish and they eventually left. We rigged up a spreader bar and appropriate size baits and worked over the area but the fish were not cooperating. We worked a couple of more shrimp boats but could not land any more tuna so we headed to a buoy about 15 miles away and quickly boated 3 mahi-mahi in the 3-6lb range before a school of porpoises showed up and shut the bite down. We had a cool show for a few minutes and headed in at 42 knots.

It was a great day on the water with old and new friends!

Final Catch:
12 red snapper 4-15lbs
5 amberjacks 25-40lbs
1 cobia 20lbs
2 blackfin tuna 20lbs
3 mahi-mahi 3-6lbs

-Chris Newman
7-17-2008