The Armchair Outfitter

So that’s why they call it a “mess” of fish. Note my oh-so-stylish footwear and frequent guest contributor Jim with the camera. If I had a pickup, his custom fish-scaler drum in the foreground would be in danger!

This trip began as a combo platter. Meet my friend Jim to look at some hunting property, and then drive on to his house for some offshore fishing the next day. There was one slight complication. My friend lives in Hellanback, Georgia (don’t try to find it on a map) and I would have to drive to Hellanback over the course of a weekend. What’s a few hundred miles in pursuit of good fishing with a good friend, right? The Sporting Wife graciously agreed to accompany me, and off we went.

We left home too late in the day, looked over 6,000 acres of prime hunting land about as well as you can in just a few hours, and drove on to Jim’s place. By the time we got there, it was late-thirty, and we still had to get gear, chum, and bait ready for the next morning. We finally went to bed about 2 1/2 hours before we were to meet his friend Charles. Jim assured me that Charles, a former military man, would not wait for us if we were late.

At 3:50 the next morning, we pulled into the parking lot that was our appointed meeting place. Jim crowed that we had even beaten Charles to the rendezvous point. Charles was uncharacteristically just on time instead of early, so we loaded our gear onto his gorgeous 21′ Cobia center console and headed to Apalachicola, Florida.

We picked up Jim’s friend Richard on the way, made a quick license stop, and got to the ramp by 6:00 A.M. The weather forecast called for 1′-2′ seas in the morning building to 3′-5′ in the afternoon. On our way out, two guys in a jon boat flagged us down. They were selling live bait, and their bait tub had sprung a leak. The tub was emptying quickly, and their boat was filling at a correspondingly rapid rate. Some hasty negotiations resulted in us making off with their entire stock for a smooth $50. Capitalism in its purest form resulted in us having a full bait well and them heading in early to make repairs.

Right away, we noticed that the seas were not as advertised. The forecast calls for 1′-2′ every time I go offshore. In all the trips I’ve made, I’m still not sure what 1′-2′ looks like. On this occasion, it looked suspiciously like 3′-5′. As things were predicted to get nasty at some point in the day, Charles was anxious to get us on the fish. Jim had warned me that Charles’s boat would “mortally fly” with its single 4-stroke 150, and I now attest to the veracity of Jim’s comment. We took a beating running cross-seas on the 14 mile trip to our first spot. This would prompt me to joke that I would have some official Armchair Outfitter fishing shirts made up that said “1 Foot to 2 Feet, My A**!” on the back.

The fishing proved fairly uneventful at our first stop, at least in terms of fish landed. There were barracuda as long as my couch all around the boat owing, no doubt, to the chum bag, but none of them were buying what we were selling. We also had some schools of dolphin (the fish, i.e., mahi-mahi) pass near the boat, but we had no takers on our flat line. At one point, we were trolling back into position to begin another drift over some structure, and two dolphin came knifing through the wake after our short line. The fish acted as though they had lock-jaw when they got to the bait. They both sounded without so much as a bump on the line. I caught a lane snapper, Richard released a short grouper, and I think we had one other keeper before moving.

The bite didn’t really turn on until we moved to another spot at about 2:00 in the afternoon. We got into a school of grunts, also known as Key West snapper, and we began pulling them up as fast as we could get our baits to the bottom and reel up five cranks. Literally, you either had a fish on, or you had might as well reel up, because one already had your bait. We caught 44 grunts in all, and I added a spadefish to the cooler. Someone reeled up a red porgy, but we were hauling them over the side so fast that I really couldn’t say who it was.

As usual, the best stories of the day pertain to “the ones that got away.” All of us hooked into at least one fish that in spite of 80 and 90 pound test, we simply couldn’t raise. Likely suspects include goliath grouper that can top 800 pounds and nurse sharks. Either way, we couldn’t budge them. I started thinking of this fish as the “bottom of the ocean” fish, because it felt like hooking solidly into the bottom. The first time I hooked it, I said, “I’m hung; I’ve got the bottom.” Just then, my rod tip gave three sharp jerks. “Don’t look now,” Jim said, ” but the bottom is moving.” Seconds later, a 90 pound fluorocarbon leader parted like gossamer and that, as they say, was that. Using a whole grunt as bait, Jim managed to hook a nasty-looking barracuda for about a nanosecond before he razored his way through 61 pound-test wire.

In spite of the fish we didn’t catch, I can honestly say that we caught them until I was ready to quit. It was one of only a handful of times in my life that I was literally fished out.

If I look tired, it’s because I am. My shirt was white at the beginning of the day. After washing, it’s still a reddish-brown that I think color experts refer to as “Mullet Gut.”

Sporting Wife and Photo Editor Wendy earns her keep and a snapper dinner.