AFW

By Jason
CLICK ON THE PICS for full size ones

Saturday, June 23, 2007
"  Another slow day but with 3 fun perks.  "

There was some talk Friday evening that we would leave Saturday morning 5am and head to a few reefs.  Well, that just didn't materialize but we did leave at 11:10am with a $9 bucket of Killer Bee chum from Walmart that I never tried before, and some live crabs from the bait pen.  4 souls on board: Jason, Karla, Amber and:

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"Spike" who was just given a "buzz cut".

First stop was flats just outside of Span A for bait.  And pinfish bait was very abundant.  We chummed for a few minutes with Kozy Kitten canned catfood, our quick and easy baitfish chum.  We loaded up on 1-2 inch pins and were on our way for the new Causeway Reef.  

Upon arrival at CR there was 1 boat working it.  We found some structure, anchored, and began chumming.  The chum lasted about 10 minutes.  But to our dismay, the only action we got was our live bait manifesting themselves in the structure giving us a real challenge dislodging our hooks over and over.

On the big 10/0 hook all day I rigged with double or triple pinfish because the pinfish were small for that big hook.  It worked!  Read on.

We decided to drift through the CR zone and we drifted at 1.1 mph for about a mile directly toward SC Tripod.  During the drift I hooked up on this nice shark:

Shark says:  "Hey buddy, I kinda like flying."
CLICK ON THE PICS for full size ones. 4:02pm

He was a little bigger (about 3 feet??)  than the usual baby sharks we catch.  The waves were really rolling us now as the day progressed.

We got to SC Tripod, anchored, and got nothing but stirred up big-time by the big rolling waves.

After a while we headed toward Fort Myers Beach to allow Spike to run around and have a bathroom break.  As we approached the beach, it quickly became evident that with all of the rolling waves that it would not be safe to park the boat at the beach and disembark.  So we headed toward Sanibel Light House at about 15mph and off-plane plowing through the waves.

Sanibel Lighthouse proved to be calm and therefore well suited for getting off of the boat.  We tested Spike's ability to swim and he gave refreshed meaning to the phrase "doggie paddling".  Paddle he did.  

Next we headed toward Span B where Alfred the Goliath Grouper was caught by Cap'n Ben Chancey some time back.  Remarkably, Span B was not closed although my understanding was that it would be closed to boat traffic due to the tear-down of the old Span B which began this week.  We anchored on the bayside of Span B and stayed here for many hours.

Soon after anchoring, I hooked up on something that gave me a great fight!  Man I love this stuff!  It is such a great feeling to try to pull up a big monster from the sea ("big" by our standards).  It turned out to be a big fat manta ray:

CLICK ON THE PICS for full size ones. 8:09pm

And he was released as good as can be without the 10/0 hook in his mouth.

 
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8:13pm

After dark we ran the submersible light and had all kinds of sea creatures heading toward our boat including counless 4-6 inch shrimp, big fatty shiners 3-6 inches, crabs 2-4 inches, and needlenose fish.  And after Amber spotted something strange we all saw what appeared to be A FOOT LONG SHRIMP but we were not able to catch it.  Crazy!  

At one point I was dozing off and my clicker started going so "startled with joy" I jumped to my feet and attempted to hook the creature.  Just then there was a loud and big stir under Span B of apparent smaller fish.  I did not hook whatever began to take my bait, but whatever it was it seemed to have alarmed the apparent smaller school of fish under the bridge.

We arrived back on land by 1:50am.

Here are a few other pictures:

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