You may not know his name if you don’t live on the Gulf Coast, but you know his work if you’ve ever seen one of us wearing “the uniform.”  You know, Costa del Mar sunglasses, cargo shorts, shirt with a fish on the back, Crocs or flip flops, optional sun hat.  It may have occurred to you to wonder, “Who’s the guy painting all these fish?”  He’s that guy on the right in the photo, Guy Harvey.

While he does paint fish wonderfully well, his other pursuits also benefit those of us who love the sea and its inhabitants as Dr. Harvey obviously does.  The Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation funds research and educational programs to encourage marine conservation and best management practices.  Although I prefer linking  based solely on payola, if you’d like to learn more, here’s Dr. Harvey’s website:  http://www.guyharvey.com/  No promotional consideration was provided in exchange for this link.  Dang it.

This June, the Sporting Wife and I met Dr. Harvey at our local Bass Pro Shops in Spanish Fort, AL.  He was gracious enough to autograph and personalize pretty much anything for a long line of people, and the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation pledged $1 for every sale of a Guy Harvey licensed product at our Bass Pro Shops that day to fund research and educational programs at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.  I appreciate that the money stays right down the road, and I admire anyone who has so many irons in so many fires and still gives his time to a worthy cause.

photo by Amy N.

Some of you may be wondering what has kept me away from the site for so long.  It’s called a job, and for the time being, I am happy to have one.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but all play and no work makes Jack a jerk.  Nevertheless, I do find time to slip away on occasion.  The Sporting Wife’s family came down for a visit the weekend of March 19, 2011.  In lieu of the traditional family activity, or as the Sporting Wife calls it, “sitting around looking at each other funny,” Uncle Gary, Cousin Tim, and I decided to get in some fishing.

This was the first trip for me since the oil spill, and things at Gulf State Park pier in the afternoon were pretty bleak.  It was the only time fishing salt water I’ve ever changed a shrimp for a fresh one.  I think the little bugger just gave up hope.  I made an executive decision and we lit a shuck for one of my favorite spots, Alabama Point.  We piddled with some saltwater catfish, locally known as hardheads, until evening.  We were about ready to leave, but I said that if our hard work were to pay off at all, it would either be in the 45 minutes before sunset or the 45 minutes after dark.

This redfish made me really look like I knew what I was doing by hammering my shrimp shortly after I announced my prediction.   I applied as much pressure as the 17-pound Momoi Diamond Line would take and turned him away from a concrete bridge piling.  He quickly responded by crossing my line with Uncle Gary’s.  I thought he was gone by the time we had untangled.  Reeling up the slack, I felt a powerful surge, and he put the best bow in my 15-foot surf rod I have seen to date.  It was touch and go until I slid him up onto the wet sand.  Then when I tried to lip him, he bit down on the three fingers I had in his mouth.  The hook popped free at the crucial juncture, but I shovel-passed him about 5 yards onto the beach.  Gary couldn’t stop laughing.  He suggested that I slosh the fish around in the water to rinse off some of the sand that was sticking to him.  “Oh no,” I said.  “He’s not getting near water again until he’s stone dead.”

We called the family to meet us at the pier for pictures, and we went back to the cleaning station to get him ready for the table.  He weighed 8 1/4 pounds and was 30 inches long.  Filleting him under the pier lights, I noticed many small parasites attached to his skin.  These pennelid copepods can be a sign of stress in marine fish, but they can also be a cause of stress.  It’s a chicken-egg issue, so I can’t make any generalizations from their presence about the health of the Gulf.  They are unsightly, but I removed them with the skin, and the resulting fillets provided a late dinner for our fishing party.

photo by Sweet Jane

It’s been a while since I wrote or posted anything to the site.  In fact, it’s been a lot longer than I knew until I checked in last week and realized almost an entire summer is gone.  With the Deepwater Horizon oil spill dominating the news down here, that’s exactly how it feels.  The summer just disappeared.  The effect on our beaches here in Baldwin County hasn’t been that bad, considering the nightmare scenario that could have been, but the effect on the local economy has been devastating.  Speaking for myself, the whole situation has exacted a mental toll as well.

Most areas have been open to catch and release fishing for weeks, but I have not fished.  The beaches are open, but I have not been snorkeling.  The seafood is inspected and certified safe to eat, but I have not visited my favorite restaurants.  Unconsciously, I’ve been avoiding anything, including this site, that would remind me of the reasons I moved here.  White sand, blue water, and abundant marine life somehow become tragic when you realize how fragile they are.  Sure, I know about hurricanes.  We’ve been through some historic ones since we’ve lived here, but this was different.  Hurricanes destroy the works of man, but nature remains unchanged.  In this whole debacle, we very nearly destroyed something we did not create and could never replace.

The yellow flag recently flying over the beach indicates “Medium Hazard.”  I’m glad to see the cautionary yellow instead of the double red flags meaning “Water Closed to Public” that flew far too long this season.  I’m “cautiously optimistic” as our politicians are so fond of saying.  Catch and keep fishing opened again at 6:00 this morning for the first time all summer.  Anglers at Gulf State Park Pier in Gulf Shores are catching bluefish, flounder, and sharks where only a week ago a significant amount of oil washed ashore.  Watching the footage of people filling coolers with their catch on the local news, I am feeling the itch to go down there and try my luck.  “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” said Alexander Pope, and I am hopeful that if we have not seen the end of this, we have at least seen the worst.

Regular visitors to this site (both of you) will no doubt remember a story about me shirking my responsibilities at a work function and slipping away for some redfish action after dark. That might have been just an isolated incident, but now a pattern seems to be emerging. I’ve been working on the Rover bull bar project in my free time the past couple of weeks, and by all rights, I should have been doing that this past Saturday. As you can see from the above photo, I was not.

My buddy Marty called me on Friday and left a couple of messages asking if I wanted to go fishing Saturday with his friend Charles. I’ve been out with Charles before on his gorgeous 25′ Grady White, and I know that Charles is a super-nice cat, so the offer was tempting. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive Marty’s messages until 23:00, and a marathon push to close cases had me scheduled to work until midnight. I told the Sporting Wife that I was going to have to blow it off and work on the truck as I had planned. Ever the responsible one, I am, but she insisted that I might not get the opportunity to go again for a while. She also observed that I had been grumbling and generally down in the mouth of late, and she thought it might do me some good to get away from the house. Translation: “You are working on my nerves, and you should get away from me for a while.”

I am not the world’s most intelligent man, but I know that when you have made enough of a nuisance of yourself that a woman urges you to go fishing, you go. Gathering my stuff and packing a cooler while watching the second half of the Lakers game on Tivo, I grudgingly set my alarm for 4:30 and hit the sack at about 2:30. I’ll admit that if not for the elbow in my ribs at 5:00 as Frank Zappa poured from the alarm clock speakers, I’d never have made it.

Marty and I met Charles and his son C.J. at the boat ramp a little after 6:00, and we were under way. C.J. tried for some hardtail just off the end of a rock jetty, as they are like candy to amberjack, but he only managed one. We had live pinfish from Marty’s backyard trap and some frozen squid, so we set out over calm water for the nearest of the rigs. Charles nailed the twin 150 Yamma-hammers, and we were seven miles out in no time.

Unfortunately, someone had beat us to this particular spot. Using a rig hook to hold position, they were pulling up one “endangered” red snapper after another. If you don’t live on the Alabama Gulf Coast, just take my word for it that we have a huge controversy down here over the very restrictive snapper season and limits. We watched these folks catch and release ten good-sized snapper in as many minutes because it would have been illegal to keep them. The season opens today, and even then, they could only have kept two.

Marty caught a big remora that he managed to release without bringing it over the side. If you’ve never made the mistake of getting a shark-sucker in your boat, don’t. They are relatively calm until they hit the deck, and then they go into berserker mode. Slime is not an adequate word to describe their skin secretions, and they bleed like stuck hogs as well. C.J. handily caught what today would be a limit of two nice snapper, and we decided that throwing a red snapper dinner repeatedly back over the side was for the birds. We hauled in the lines and pointed the boat toward Cuba. A pair of porpoises joined us, playing in our bow wake for a while. We were making pretty good time, and they were just loafing. I could hear their sighing exhalations over the engine noise as they exchanged stale air for fresh.

Starting about twenty miles out, there are a number of old Army tanks sunk to provide artificial reef habitat, and we decided to see if they were holding any fish. We set out trolling rigs to make a pass or two before settling down to bottom fish, and our efforts were rewarded almost immediately. I hooked into the king mackerel in the photo. Foul-hooked in the back with the rear treble of a diving plug, she pulled straight away like a nuclear sub, burning line off a medium-heavy rod and reel in short runs. It took me at least a half-dozen tries to get her into position for C.J. to gaff her. She was definitely legal, as we measured 28 inches to the fork of the tail, but I regretted keeping her later. Although outwardly there was no sign, when C.J. was filleting her, we saw that she was full of eggs. With the gash in her back from the hook, she probably would have been an easy meal for a shark if we had released her, but I still hate the loss of all those future generations.

The bottom fishing never materialized, as the fish couldn’t leave the trolling lures alone for the rest of the day. We even caught one of the “rare” red snapper on a trolling jig. When a fish normally caught on bottom rigs with live bait takes a jig trolled at eight miles per hour, you are having a good day. We got two more kings, and we caught seven little tunny, locally known as bonita. These are the false albacore of the eastern seaboard, and they are reputedly not fit to eat. We kept six as an experiment. I am letting the fillets bleed out in an ice water brine in preparation for the smoker, and I shall report my findings. We went back to the bottom rigs at the end of the day just to see what we could get, but an undersized gag grouper for me was the only result. That potential entree went back over the side, and we headed for home.

I don’t know when I’ll ever get that truck finished.

photo by Perry Myer

My buddy Perry and I slipped away from a work function last week to get in a few hours of surfcasting at Alabama Point. This 6 3/4 pound redfish had a love for shrimp that proved his undoing. We didn’t wet a hook until around 21:30, and I caught this bad boy after 23:00. We dressed him on a trash can lid and beat it back to the hotel just as the clock was turning midnight. The trip and the meeting I chaired the next morning were both “interesting.”

The sun sinks into Little Lagoon at the end of another day in paradise, Gulf Shores, AL.

Natural Born Killers

The Spanish mackerel, Scomberomorus maculatus, is a migratory pelagic carnivore. He swims in schools, and he is most comfortable when surrounded by fish of roughly the same size. When feeding on schooling baitfish, he is a wrecking machine. His thin, hydrodynamically efficient body tapers from a snapping mouth full of razor-sharp teeth to a thin, sickle-shaped tail. His spiny dorsal fin folds into a groove on his back to decrease any resistance to his passage through the water. His tiny smooth scales and a slick coating of slime eliminate any drag on his reflective silver body. His yellow-olive spots resemble the camouflage pattern on a fighter plane.

In the early fall, the Spanish mackerel passes though our little corner of the world on his annual migration. Depending on the water temperature, September normally finds him in large schools near our shores. His revels sometimes bring him so close to the beach that he is within the reach of surfcasters. More often, he is found in mass within a few hundred yards of the surf zone engaged in his favorite activity: shredding schools of baitfish.

I recently had my first experience with a school of breaching Spanish mackerel, and I have to say that it is not a spectacle for those of a delicate constitution. Mackerel boil the surface of the ocean on all sides, slashing down on the fleeing baitfish like vengeance itself. Seagulls float on the surface and circle overhead to feed on the dead and the dying. It is a gory spectacle of carnage. Preparing to cast into that melee made me uneasy. As it turned out, my fears were well founded. Before we had eased our way over the treacherous sandbars at Little Lagoon Pass into the Gulf, Marty had hooked into a bull redfish that effected its escape by straightening a 35 pound test wire snap. Marty was crestfallen;I was too shocked by the mere thought of such a fish to display any reaction at all. The lost fish proved a harbinger of things to come. We encountered the first school of the murderous Spanish just out of the pass.

Fast Fish and Loose Fish

We intended to troll through the fish with king rigs, but we cut the engine in response to shouts of protest from some kayak fishermen. Figuring there were plenty of mackerel for everyone, we started drifting with the school. We used the motor to make minor course corrections and to sprint after the fish when they sounded. Casting into the school with either a 1 oz. Gotcha lure or a silver spoon produced an immediate, rod bending strike on nearly every cast. Countless fish tail-walked along the surface and threw the baits back in our faces. I had a couple of cutoffs fishing 25 pound test Momoi Diamond Line. Ladyfish struck with their initial gut wrenching surges followed by aerial acrobatics to rival any billfish. One Spanish mackerel yanked the rear treble free from a Gotcha right at boatside. Anyone who’s ever fished these sturdy steel lures can attest to the line pull that would be required to accomplish such a feat. A man with stout pliers would have a tough time duplicating it.

A nick in my line sent an $8.00 Bomber Long-A plug farther into the Gulf than I could ever have cast it were it still encumbered by the weight of the line. We threw everything we had, and they broke off or destroyed all of it. We wound up with only five keepers. Marty landed the biggest of the day, a 4 3/4 pounder that fought so gamely that I thought he had a small tarpon. In trying to net the fish, I fouled a treble hook in the outside of the net. The length of the fish prevented me from simply turning the net inside out, so the fish and I were at an impasse. I shouted my predicament to Marty and decided that victory comes to he who dares. I yanked net, lure, and fish over the side in a thrashing, seething mess, and relief flooded Marty’s face. Snapping at my ankles and wrists, the bloodthirsty beast fought all the way into the fish box. In the end we didn’t run out of fish; we ran out of tackle.

You Should Have Been Here Last Week

Armed with about $40 worth of new tackle each, we set out again the following weekend. Darrell was along this time, and Marty and I regaled him with tales of busted gear and bruised egos. The conditions were identical to the preceding weekend when we’d had success. Identical, that is, except for the absence of the fish. They had already moved to the next layover on their migration route. Darrell caught a nice straggler, and we wound up with three smallish bluefish, but the great shoals of baitfish and their merciless predators had vanished.

With fish in the cooler, we ran in toward the beach and dropped anchor in about two feet of water. I gave a couple of good hauls on the line to dig the flukes well into the soft sand. Satisfied that the anchor was set, we piled over the side and into the shallow water. I was glad to have bagged my wallet in a Ziploc before leaving on this adventure. We waded in and walked about fifty yards up the beach headed for Hooters. Once across the beach road, we went around back and washed off the sand with a hose the staff uses to wash down the parking lot. A cook stepping outside to smoke had a good laugh. We may not have looked the part, but I felt quite piratical. After pitchers and buffalo shrimp, we waded back to our vessel. Relieved to find her intact and unmolested, Marty firewalled the throttle for home. Even with the high tide, we had to disembark in the water and walk her over the sandbar. As my friend Marty says, “It’s a hard damn life, but somebody’s gotta live it.”

The author’s son Scott and a friend, Lee Gilstrap, with a nice amberjack Lee caught on his first offshore trip.

- by Jim Overman

(Editor’s note: For those who have never ventured offshore but are fortunate enough to be planning a trip in the near future, here are some tips from a salty dog.)

1. When the marine forecast states a wave height number (as in 1′ – 2′, 3′ – 5′, etc.) that is the AVERAGE height of the wave from the normal sea level. In other words a 2 to 3 means that the average wave is 2 to 3 feet higher than the normal sea surface . . . it also means than it is 2 to 3 feet below the sea surface level . . . so the waves are actually 4 to 6 feet tall from top to bottom. There will be some waves that are larger, so do not be caught off guard. The wave period, direction, and steepness are important as well, but these are considerations for the more advanced fisherman or boat owner.
2. When the forecast is 1 to 2….do not believe it!!!!
3. Take Dramamine the night before the trip. It lasts up to 24 hours, and it works best if taken the night before. You can take another dose in the morning, but this is usually not necessary unless you are very prone to motion sickness.
4. Ginger also works well to settle your stomach and ease motion sickness. You can find ginger tablets at most health food stores and some pharmacies. It is great because it does not make you sleepy.
5. Ginger ale is a good choice to ease your stomach and quench your thirst.
6. Drink extra water the day before the trip.
7. SUNSCREEN!!! Apply at least SPF 30 every 4 to 6 hours. It helps to apply EARLY in the morning, maybe even before you leave the dock. Do not forget your ears, lips, eyelids, feet, ankles, nose, the backs of your legs, the back of your neck, and the top of your head. (I have burned all of the aforementioned locations while fishing.)
8. Bring extra zip lock bags and hand towels; you will find uses for them.
9. Wear a hat, and do not let it blow away.
10. No glass on the boat.
11. No block ice in the drink cooler. (It can crush cans or plastic bottles.)
12. Bring extra water for drinking. (Drink more water than beer.)
13. No bananas on the boat (It’s bad luck, and most captains believe this one!)
14. Wear quick-drying, light-colored clothes that you do not mind staining. This is especially important if you use squid for bait. Swim trunks are great for the guys and bikinis are perfect for the attractive gals . . . but maybe that’s just my opinion.
15. A light jacket is a good idea if you are the least bit cold natured. (It can get cool early in the mornings or if you encounter a sudden thunderstorm.)
16. DO NOT go barefoot on the boat if you are anywhere near the fish or fishing equipment.
17. DO NOT place your hands or fingers inside the mouth or near the gills of any fish!!! (The crew will instruct you on how to handle fish if the need should arise.)
18. Do not let go of the rod if it is not secured in a rod-holder…even for a second.
19. Prepare for after the trip is over.
    1. Place one 2-liter container of water (rinsed and refilled Diet Coke bottles work fine) for each person in your party either in the back of your truck or inside the trunk of your car before leaving on the boat. This is to serve as a quick rinse before heading home. The water will be hot and it will be greatly appreciated. Trust me on this one.
    2. Have extra bath or beach towels as well as a few washcloths in your vehicle to be used for drying after your two-liter shower and to sit on while driving or riding.
    3. A small bottle of tear-free shampoo is a good thing. It smells good and does a great job removing salt.
    4. A small container of hand sanitizer is nice for a final rinse of the hands and to clean any small cuts.
    5. Have some extra clothes, especially shirts.
    6. Bring a cooler with ice for the fish! (Include extra zip lock bags if you are going to have the fish cleaned by the crew.) In some cases you can save money if you clean the fish yourself. If you properly pack the fish in ice, it is NO PROBLEM waiting until the next day to clean them. The only real exceptions are sharks.
    7. One tablespoon of lemon juice, salt, pepper, garlic powder, cajun spice, ¼ cup of olive oil, and a cup or two of wine (white or blush) over most saltwater fish works great for grilling, baking, or broiling. I like to mix the ingredients ahead of time and put them into a gallon plastic bag. Then as soon as some of the fish are cleaned, I place the fish in the bag for at least 15 minutes (you can leave them up to 24 hours.) This makes a great pretreatment before cooking. The fish can be removed from the bag, wrapped in foil, and then thrown on the grill or into a 400 degree oven. (It is really cool to eat fish that fresh!)
    8. If you are staying in a hotel or other location where you cannot cook the fish that day, try some of the local restaurants or resorts. Often you can carry in your own fish and the chef will cook it for you. There is a charge of course for the cooking as well as the side items, but it is well worth it. You will need to call ahead of time and make arrangements. (In Key West, FL, and in Savannah, GA, this is really popular.)

From landlubber to sea dog on his first voyage! “Lucky” Lee Gilstrap with a barracuda he caught on the same trip as the A.J. Nice going, swabby.

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.

Jon Smith, President of the McNairy Central Bobcats, Class of 1988.

Jon caught this tripletail with a shrimp under a buoy last week. He was fishing off the end of the island where he works near Savannah, GA. Nice work if you can get it, Jon!

- by Melody in Orange Beach

Went snapper fishing on a hot Tuesday in early July. Our first attempt at fishing
on a 23′ Contender was for tarpon that have been rumored to be running
along the beach; no luck there. We did, however, witness several leatherback
turtles and some Ridley’s turtles scoping out the beaches for egg laying
possibilities. We finally decided to go to a spot 12-13 miles out for some
snapper.

SUCCESS!! We caught a few keepers and some smaller fish that we threw
back. This is the first snapper I have caught in all of my saltwater fishing
experiences. Snapper put up a good fight, pound for pound. We were using
medium tackle so we would be less likely to injure the fish if we had to
put them back. I would definitely recommend a snapper trip to anyone who has
a chance!!!

– Melody