Feelin' like Tina Turner

Yea, it’s a bad pun, but it’s the only one I got. We got smacked around by Ike pretty good around here. But we powered through it and made the most of everything, got to run the chainsaw quite a bit and managed to scavenge up some good cookin wood from around the neighborhood. Ate well every day and kept the grill hot for about 5 days running. Here’s pics.

Good Friends have Good Fishing

Saturday Aug. 23, 2008

The weather was all rain and lightning early in the week and it made me nervous that the plans might get scrubbed but low and behold, I found myself looking at the sky friday and thinking how nice it must be for Woody, eric, and Chris down on the coast.
I shagged down to Surfside Friday night. when I arrived I found that the afternoon's whiskey fueled fires had subsided and the boys were enjoying the amenities at the Anchor Inn.
This place in Surfside is far from a five star resort, in fact I found it impossible to find any single thing about the hotel that was even as good as 'unacceptable'
Most notably the odor. Anyway, We woke up well before the sun and after a stop to gather a couple cups of coffee we were soon loading Capt. Chris Farley's boat.
This is the same captain we ran offshore with earlier when the seas were rough. We had none of the same type of issues this time out. The ride was smooth enough that
we could enjoy our beverages easily while Sitting in a bean bag skipping across the nearly smooth surface of the Gulf of mexico. In fact, Capt. Chris would later remark that we didn't see a wave over 2 ft. all day.
The upshot of the smooth water was that we were able to run fast out to the hot spots the captain had in mind. Less than two hours later we cut the engines and started trolling for kingfish and it didn't take long for the fish to play along.
This early morning fishing was one of the multitude of highlights of the day. I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to run a trolling jig with a sardine behind the boat but it got even better when Eric fought in his first kingfish ever. The good times and good fishing had
everyone in high spirits especially myself. Everyone in the boat was cleaning up at this fishin' hole, except me. Woody was lucky enough to get hooked up with a nice amber jack was gaffed into the boat very early in the day.

Eric caught an extremely large kingfish, the largest I've ever personally seen caught. All good things must come to an end and the excellent fishing at this spot stopped. We hit a couple other honey holes where we trolled for kings. Even if I was the butt of the joke, it was fun to be ribbed constantly about being unable to catch a kingfish, Luckily I finally put a kingfish in the boat about this time.Woody proved that he had some sort of Zen connection with the Red Snapper, hooking them up constantly.

Chris Z. and myself adapted the “do exactly what woody does” fishing method to hook a couple red snapper also, unfortunately Red Snapper in federal waters are off limits now so some very large delicious fish got sent back into the dark blue water. We had a limit of kingfish when we started headed back inshore.

During the ride in Alan demonstrated his offshore skills, spotting weed mats for us to fish around. Trolling around a weed line approx. 25miles offshore we were surprised to hook up with a wahoo.

We tried to troll up some Dorado but they proved to be much more catchable with a small treble hook and a hunk of squid. We fished several weed lines with the small treble hook rigs. The fishing was hot and heavy since the school of fish would stay active and near the boat so long as one of the hooked Dorado was kept in the water until his colleague could be hooked.
We made one final stop in Texas Waters to pull some legal Red Snapper in before heading for the fish cleaning table where we got lots of helpful fish cleaning tips from the old guy who runs the Fish Cleaning Service that we declined.

All in All I feel like Saturday we may well have had the type of fishing that that lead to Capt. Chris telling his clients on Sunday " You Should have been here yesterday..."

Backyard Terror

An interesting occurrence occurred the other day, since things have been slow here on the page, and at the behesting of Mr. Woody, here it is:

I walked out the back door to have a smoke with my coffee, not feeling blood thirsty, or at least not excessively so, just the standard means that naturally occur: the baseline. I looked and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a squirrel in my wood pile. Honestly, it was a squirrel; this is no twisted metaphor that needs further explanation. He kicked up his little squirrel heels and began running at the sight of me lighting my smoke, I thought nothing of it, then the blood lust rose from nowhere, I looked in my hand and there was my weapon, albeit a nontraditional weapon, but a weapon just as much; a blue childproof Bic lighter. Quick as a whistle I reared back and let it fly with all my might, well much of my might anyway. The old days of rodeo and nurse meeting have left me cautious about when I use all my might in a throw. Shoulders ain’t what they once were, and a few rounds of “dent the barn with a testicle” leaves me feeling about like I did serious hand to hand with a Wookie. For those of you who don’t know Wookies are notorious for pulling folks shoulders out of joint during hand to hand combat. So anyway, I threw that blue Bic lighter with much of my might, and to my surprise, I centered it up on that squirrel and rolled him. Caught him where the neck meets the shoulders.

I stood there for a moment, astonished. As I walked over to collect my kill, I reached for my trusty yeller knife, a constant companion, only to discover it wasn’t in my pocket. There was a good reason for this, being as I had only recently woken up, I was not wearing pants, just underpants, and my underpants don’t have pockets, hence: no knife. Being as I was nearly half way to my quarry, I decides to collect him and give him a lookie see, being as this was my first Bic-kill and all. Figured I’d throw him on top of the grill, finish my smoke, slip inside and grab my knife and then skin out my fresh breakfast. Well that what I figured anyways.

So I collected him, picked him up by the tail, now bear with me as I feel the grip is noteworthy. If you were to make a hitch hiking (or Aggie approval) gesture with your right hand, go ahead, you can do it while reading…I’ll wait. So squirrel tail pointing down, running through the palm of the hand, squirrel oriented so if you had a longer thumb, you could place it right square on the critters bung hole. I noticed he was a juvenile, thank you Dr. Honeycut. Now raise your hand up to your face as though you were looking, closely inspecting, wondering why there was no blood leaking from the ears, nose, or mouth. At this point I should have taken nature’s cues and backed away slowly before the wrath was unleashed. I didn’t; ever the inquisitive type, I inspected closer. In hind sight, I believe this was the exact moment things got western.

So as I’m sure you may have guessed, the squirrel regained his ghost, and with vigor. He went freakin’ wild in spades. I was able only to control my coarse motor skills, for some reason, the fine ones that open the hand failed me. I did what anyone would do when suddenly confronted face to face with a formerly concussed, recently westernized squirrel…I ran. Unfortunately I ran with the squirrel still in my grip, it was all happening too fast to correctly register in my still groggy, un-caffeinated, and only marginally nicotined brain. I was operating in the fight or flight, reptile portion of my grey matter and realized something about myself I had never known before: I’m apparently terrified of squirrels. I screamed, then my scream scared me even more because it was the primordial scream they talk about on Shark Week. Yea, the type where the girl is swimming along side the boat and gets attacked by a 14 ft tiger shark. No, not the first scream that follows the curiosity bump, and not the next one where teeth meet bone, but the following one, the one where she has been drug under into the briny deep and comes to the complete realization of the entire impact of the situation. Yea, that scream when she breaks the surface, that’s what I heard…chilled my blood.

So the squirrel is screaming at me, like an over anxious little kid blowing on a squirrel whistle for the first time, running circles around my hand by the short leash dictated by my death grip on its tail, clawing my arm with each lap. I’m running slightly larger circles in my underpants, slinging coffee all over the back yard, extinguished cigarette hanging from my lip, flailing my arms like I’m covered with invisible spiders, one empty cup of coffee in one hand, one wildly pissed off squirrel in the other, screaming like a shark attack victim. Musta looked like some primitive rain dance or a whole hearted attempt at unpowered flight, wish it was someone else; I really would have liked to watch the situation escalate. However it was me, I was terrified, and it was horrible.

After the third lap around the yard, a sudden calm fell over me: I realized I had met my maker, this was the end of me. I had fought the good fight and was bested. I accepted my demise, apparently relaxing my grip. The squirrel pulled free of my hand, ran up my arm, presumably to give the “coups de grace” in the form of a neck bite to sever my jugular. Instead, he jumped on my head and ran down my other still flailing arm and, with impeccable timing, at the height of my flail zenith was catapulted to a tree and then jumped to the house. He paused at the roof line and gave me another earful of some incomprehensible and perplexing gibberish I could only take to be a warning not to be throwing lighters at squirrels. I took his words to heart. Think I’m gonna quit smoking all together, just to avoid the temptation.

Sorry, no pictures.

Sitka, Alaska

I'm just back from a two day fishing trip to Sitka, AK. Catching big fish in a far away place was an awesome experience. I have never fished for either species and it is always interesting to learn how fish are caught in different areas. I was fishing with my uncle and two of his buddies from Washington State.

On day #1 we focused on catching salmon and halibut. We took turns fishing with two rods dedicated for each species. I caught a nice king salmon and lost another one. I also caught two halibut. The big one was 64" (134lbs according to the length & weight tables). Hauling it up from 200' on heavy tackle was an awesome battle. The rough seas also added to the fun. Our limit of 8 halibut also included another one that weighed about 70lbs.

On day #2 we fished for salmon. It was very slow and we picked up fish sporadically throughout the day. There were some long dry spells without any fish being caught. I only caught one king salmon all day but it was another memorable fight. The fish and I circled the boat a couple of times and it made several nice runs when I got it close to the boat. The other guys scored two more king salmon and five coho (silver) salmon. We took a break from salmon and caught a few rockfish but nobody was very excited about it. I'm not sure why the Captain decided to do this.

On the return flight I checked 1 box of frozen & vacuum sealed halibut and salmon fillets that weighed 50lbs. I also had a 10lb box of rockfish fillets. Due to some airline issues my flight back involved visiting 5 airports (Sitka, Ketchican, Seattle, Portland, and San Jose). The fish remained frozen even though my trip took about 4 hours longer than expected.

The other 3 guys that I fished with are veterans of many alaska trips and they thought this was the slowest fishing they have ever experienced. They also weren't crazy about our captain. I have to agree that I think he lost interest about half way through day #2.

Belize

Well, my parents had a good run of luck and decided they wanted to take the whole family to Belize for a week. Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister-in-law, Niece, Nephew1, Nephew2, Bekki, and I all piled in a plane and headed south. When we go there, we set up camp here:

My goal while there this time was to fish, snorkel, and eat as much lobster as I could. I had grand visions of tarpon fishing the flats, but that was not to be due to weather stirring up the sediment. So we settled on half-day reef fishing.

The first guide was not all that glorious. He picked us up at 8:00 am and quickly informed us that we needed to go catch bait because he didn’t bring any. At about 10:30 am with about 50 baits in the live well, we decided to start fishing. I had already downed about 3 beers and was fighting the urge to strangle the guy. About 5 minutes later we had a bait out and the fishing commenced. Granted, once we started, we caught a good number of little barracuda and snapper.

It was great fun for about 45 minutes then the “guide” decided it was time to go try for a big fish. I won’t get started on this. Suffice it to say that I could have done just as good drinking a rum and not fishing. So we headed back to the dock. That’s right 45 minutes of hardcore steady pulling one fish after another. That was the extent of our “6 hour” trip.

To blow off some steam, Bekki and I decided we should go snorkeling, so we booked a trip and headed out to see the sharks and rays. Our guide for this trip was more than good. There were 4 other boats in the area that we went. NONE of them had ANY critters around them. This was the view from our boat:

After gearing up Bekki and I dove in. I knew we would get to swim with the sharks, but I didn’t know the guide would let me hold one – MUCH LESS TWO!

Well that was all the excitement for that day. The next morning, I tried the pier again. For some reason the puffers were running that day. I caught 6 in a little under 15 minutes, but nothing to stink the pot.

We saw the island and all sorts of other stuff, but since this is a sportsmen’s (and sportswomen’s) site, I’ll just stick to the sporty stuff.

Our next half-day fishing charter went much better than the first to say the least. The guide showed up at 7am with bait and in 20 minutes we were fishing. We caught probably 16 million grunts which were thrown back as trash fish. The keepers consisted of queen triggerfish, mutton snapper, yellow tails, and porgies. Then Bekki, whose first and only redfish was bigger than any of mine to date, hauled off and caught a grouper. This is something that I have been seeking for a long time now. Shortly after releasing that one, she rubbed it in a bit more by catching a second grouper.


It also was released, but that didn’t help things any especially since she reminds me about both the redfish and the grouper at least once a day now.

Finally, I got a break and added a fish to my life list. And, dare I say, I am the only one among the core group here who has successfully caught a nurse shark? It was very strange – 15 lb test line, no leader, coral reef, and boated a ~50 pound shark. My mind can’t comprehend the unlikelihood.


It was a great trip. All the guides are very conscientious of the fisheries sustainability, and the importance of keeping everything clean and “untouched” by people. If ever you get a chance to go, do it.

Don't forget to see my blue water trip below.

Is anyone getting jealous yet?

Blue Water......FINALLY!!!

Now that I can actually post pictures I will let everyone see this. It's been a long time since I have seen the blue water. However, a couple of weeks ago, we found it about 80 miles offshore, and in about 350 feet of water. I and 5 other guys headed out with a guide from College Station. He has a 32 foot Parker center console, and he knows how to find the fish. Saturday before last when I went with Steve, Chris, Woody, and Jim, we went 30 miles out and found a few fish. This guy, Robert, went out the same day only 8 miles and boated over 70 fish including a limit of snapper, grouper, kings, cobia, and others.

Anyway, we pulled up to a spot and tried for amberjack.
Nothing on the first two drifts so we decided to move to a rig. There were fish everywhere, but for some reason they just weren’t hungry. After a couple of bites and no hook-ups, we gave up on the amberjack. We headed to another spot and began catching one fish after another. Mostly vermilion snappers. We also caught some VERY nice gray snapper of about 8 pounds each. While loading the boat with meat, we let out a couple of free-lines which were periodically getting inhaled by kingfish. On one of our drifts, a dusky shark of about 11 feet decided to check us out. I, being the only one who cared anything about landing a shark of that size, grabbed the free-line rod and got the hook-up. I’m not sure how many of you have tried fighting a 500 lb+ fish on 30 lb line with a 18 inch steel leader, but there is this ominous feeling hanging over your head. You are having a blast listening to the drag, but you know deep down that inevitably there will be that gut-wrenching SNAP followed by slack line. Oh well, it was fun. Shortly after, a 9 foot bull shark came to check us out. We just finger-banged it and went on about our business.

On the way back in, the captain put us over a rock that couldn’t have been much bigger than a pickup truck. After about 30 minutes, we had our fill of 20 inch snappers and we were off to the dock.
All in all, it was a glorious trip. Final Tally:

12 Red Snapper
10 Gray Snapper
24 Vermilion Snapper
3 Triggerfish
1 Porgy
6 King fish
1 Ling
And untold hundreds of throw-backs of various sorts.

Stay tuned for my posting of my recent trip to Belize as well.

I caught this vermilion rock fish on Saturday. It was not a big specimen but he was dinner for two. I seasoned it will dill and lemon and cooked it whole on the smoker. I also flavored it with a chunk of almond wood. I was very pleased with the results.





I used my GPS to hit a spot on my fishing map. It was called a hump but I didn't notice and structure from 60' up in the water column. I changed my lure to a 3oz bucktail jig so that I could hit bottom. I caught the fish on the second drop but nothing more. I fished for about 45 minutes and then made the 2 mile paddle back to the beach where Michelle was hanging out.

Reel Satisfaction was Real Satisfying

June 14th, 2008 It isn't often that you lay in bed hoping for the alarm to go off. But when it is programmed to call reveille at 4:00am you know something big is in the air.

Jim and I waited on my front porch and I felt my spirits rise when the big dodge pick-up pulled to a stop in front of the house. Woody Chris and Alan jumped out, we “Howdy-ed” and shook hands then we packed into the truck and headed south, headed back to my house because I had forgotten my wallet then headed south again 20 minutes later.

We arrived at the dock embarrassingly late and loaded the cases of beer onto the 25ft Contender. I asked Capt. Chris Farley what to expect, hoping to be told of Huge Snapper, Long Kingfish, and Drag Pulling Amber Jacks, and he said it was ROUGH out there.

Capt. Chris had three large bean bag chairs that completely mitigated the roughness of the ride and one person could ride in the center console on the foot pad making it a comfortable ride for four fishermen. Even so, the rough seas meant that that ride was a bit slow and meant that running far enough offshore to find amberjacks was out of the question. We took turns being the odd man out and getting the full effect of the 4 to 6 ft seas on the way out to the fishing. It was rough enough that twice the capt. asked if we wanted to keep going out. Obviously, we did not ask to head back to the dock, you don't get a crew like this together often enough turn around before even a single line gets wet. I for one was smiling broadly on the run out, it was great to feel the great outdoors and to be there with great friends. As we rode out we surveyed the fishing gear and were happy to see many of the same reels that we have in our personal collections. After about 2 hours of battering by the Gulf of Mexico we throttled down in the proximity of a rig approx. 30 miles offshore.

We first endeavored to pull some red snapper up from the bottom. We fished "Snapper Jigs". A heavy lead head with a buck tail and standard hook, and a stinger hook attached to the hook with an inch and a half of wire leader. Each Jig was baited with Sardines, double hooking them, once through the eye and once in the body between the dorsal fin and tail.
We fished the bottom third of the 80ft water depth, the fishing was slow but the Snappers landed were good sized. We had several Snappers in the boat when I hooked up with domething that ran out, away from the boat rather than down. After a nice fight I brought a 38 inch Cobia to the side of the boat where the Captain put the Gaff to it and hauled the thrashing sea creature up onto the deck of the boat. After getting the Cobia onto the ice and sharing a slimy, bloody handshake we got back to the Snapper and it didn't take long for Woody to hook up with something that was clearly of a heavier class by the way it bent the rod over. When it was finally in the boat we all remarked that while we had seen pictures of such Snapper (15+ pounds) it was the largest any of us had ever seen in person, head and tail longer than the other legal Snappers.

Fishing at this site slowed but we managed a few more Snapper before moving to a honey hole a few miles away. Fishing over this wreck was fun, we dropped the Snapper rigs at the captains' signal and everyone immediately hooked up. The fish here were smaller, typically on the edge of the 16 inch limit, but in two passes we had filled the 10 Snapper limit for the boat and began bump trolling jigs with either Sardines or Ribbon Fish for pelagic fishes. The rig was similar but it was a much lighter jig head, and the rigs for ribbon fish had two stingers to hook the long baits.

We trolled over the wreck a few times quickly putting a legal kingfish in the icebox but subsequent passes yielded no bites so we loaded up and ran again to another spot with structure. We trolled baits but saw zero action at his location and decided to head back inshore where fishing had been better earlier. We worked in, bouncing from rig to rig with little besides the fun of fishing with friends to show but a few trigger fish.

On the run between rigs Alan spotted birds over a tremendous writhing mass of bait. The action was along a rip line and we worked the area in and around the bait, We landed a couple blacktip sharks and were taunted by a boat-wise Cobia that apparently wasn’t in the mood for a late lunch of sardine or ribbon fish. We threw every type of terminal tackle in the boat at that fish as it swam around the boat to no avail. Finally we gave up and trolled away only to have a sardine hit and broke off on a line far behind the boat.

As we pushed into Texas waters the color changed to green, we pulled up in the shadow of a rig and commenced to catch one blacktip shark after another, Jim and Woody especially had a knack for hooking the ocean predators, at least a dozen sharks were brought boatside and released but the number may have been 16 or possibly 143 it was tough to keep track. There were several times were there were doubles hooked up. If there weren’t a limit of 1 shark per boat we would likely still be filleting. The shark fishing around this rig really made the trip a memorable experience. It was gratifying to hear the radio fall silent indicating that the other boats working the Gulf that afternoon had given up and knowing that we were happily fighting 4 foot sharks. I think that when we finally loaded up and headed for Freeport that everyone was very satisfied.

Capt. Chris urged us to come again when the water conditions promised to be more condusive to kingfish and amberjack and I intend to take him up on the offer because Capt. Chris obviously has a customer first attitude. Capt. Chris Farley did everything I hope and expect a fishing guide to do: He ran the boat quick so we could spend more time fishing than boating without beating us to death. He managed the drifts well and kept us on fish whenever there were fish, he was willing to fish the way we wanted to when we saw the birds and bait, he ran the gaff well, was pleasant to chat with, and it obviously bothered him when the fishing was slow.

Success at last

After a long dry spell I finally got to see some blood spilled from a critter. Last week we had a safety gathering here at Anadarko. Most of our safety people came in from all over the US in addition to a couple of people from our international offices. On Friday, I took John Geng and Jeff Ostmeyer to Blanton’s place for an evening of shooting and pig hunting. John, being from China, is not allowed to own any kind of gun, so we thought it would be a good idea to let him shoot lots of different guns. The arsenal looked somewhat like this:

5 -- .22 LR rifles
3 -- .22 Magnum Rifles
1 – 6 mm Remington
1 – 300 Magnum
1 – AK-47
1 – AK-74
1 – Mini 14
2 -- .22LR pistols
1 – 380 pistol
1 -- 9mm pistol
1 – 45 pistol
2 – 12 ga. Shotguns

There were others as well.

Anyway, I gave john my hat to wear and we gave him a few lessons. He did very well for a beginner. I’m not sure how many rounds were fired, but there were plenty.

As it started to get late, we headed to the stands to wait on some pigs to come to the feeders. John had proven himself worthy with the 6 mm as you can see in the picture. We saw 3 deer and a couple of coons, nothing for me to get really excited about, but John was having the time of his life. Unfortunately, no pigs came to our feeder, so we headed to pick up Jeff right after dark. His weapon of choice was the AK-74 with illuminated reticles and a laser sight. It worked well. When we picked him up, there were two dead pigs laying out in the field that had become that way after the shooting light had left. We loaded them up and took them to the gutting place. After we took the insides out, we hung them up and took the outsides off.

I gave all the meet to Jeff, and he met me at the office this morning with a few packages of sausage. All in all, it was a great time. John will be able to tell all his friends what Texas is really like.

Shittiest Charter Ever

Here is a report from the shittiest charter trip that I have ever been on. This trip wasn't even worthy of a photograph although I was so happy to see the dock again that I almost took a picture of it.

Michelle wanted to go fishing so I thought I would book us a trip on a party boat for the June 1st opening of rockfish season in the North Central zone (bay area). I checked the buoys on saturday night before going to bed and was pleased to see the waves were only 4'. I checked the buoys again at 5am on sunday morning to find 8' swells at 8 seconds. Shit. We also had 20-25kt wind to go with the overcast and cold (low 50's) forecast. Apparently it takes more than this to cancel the charter boats.

Michelle and I wore blue jeans because I told her that there was no way we could get wet on a 40' boat. As soon as we cleared the leeward side of pillar point we experienced the full swell. The boat rolled so hard that water shot through the drains on the port side and soaked my left leg. Then we rolled hard to the starboard side and soaked my right leg. Shit. This went on periodically for the next hour until we got to the fishing grounds. That was about the time that I realized that I not only wasn't dressed appropriately but also I didn't have enough layers on. It was going to be a cold day.

We drift fished in 90-120' of water. The boat was broadside to the wind and swell so it was rolling hard about every 8 seconds or so. The fishing also sucked. It was very slow and most of the fish that came up were quite small. I tried throwing a couple of them back but apparently it is a one way trip from 100'. Every rockfish is a keeper no matter the size unless it is a protected canary rock fish - those are released dead (california law). The fishing was so slow that we stayed out the whole day. There were a lot of unhappy people on board. I would say that of the 25 people on board only about 5 people fished the whole time. I took some satisfaction from outfishing charlie for the first time ever. I was the boat people on this trip.

Being that it was a party boat there were also some annoying characters on board. There was a guy who showed up piss drunk. He passed out during the trip out there but his a-hole friends woke him up when it was time to fish. Of course he was on the railing to my left. After he crashed into me a few times I grabbed him by the coat and told him to get away from me. He got belligerent so his friends dragged him away. Luckily he was passed out for more of the trip than he was awake.

Michelle hung in there for a while but after a few hours she joined the non-fishing crowd. For someone who is prone to motion sickness she did really well considering the conditions. Back on the dock I asked the captain what he thought of the day and he said it was a 8.5 - 9 on the shitty scale (10 being perfect shittiness).