Shrimp Boats

Right now, we are fishing behind the shrimp boats for tuna. This is pretty cool but a lot of work at the same time! Aaron and I try to keep enough chum cut up while fishing but this is a challenge. We go through about 50-75 pounds of pogies a day on top of the ton of bonita that we cut up and baskets of by catch that we get from the shrimp boats!

Next, we try, and I do mean try to keep the boat clean! We catch bonita for bait with poppers and cut bait. When these things hit the deck, the blood goes everywhere. The blackfin are almost as bad as the bonita and then the big yellowfin, well who cares what kind of mess they make! They are the whole reason that we are there in the first place!  Fish over 200 pounds are caught behind these boats every year! The last yellowfin they we caught on the boats weighed 130pounds!

We had been fishing the boats all day with no yellowfin to show for it. We had caught beautiful blackfin and we were one fish short of an amberjack limit (thanks to Gray not telling me he was catching and I had to run around for a while) but we really wanted that yellowfin!  After Gray had caught him limit of jacks and left us with the left overs, we finished up after the sharks said we had enough, we plotted Tiger Pass on the gps and were heading home. About 10 miles into the trip back in, we noticed one lonely shrimp boat and decided to give it one last shot! After a few drifts, Aaron and i were chuming like hell trying to get rid of all of the chum before we left the boat, I had a line out and it started to scream, I set the hook and figured, hey, a good blackfin.  Was I wrong, this fish took line to the bottom (around 220 ft) and said I will stay here a while, AND HE DID!   I have video on the website of this fight, check it out at http://www.deepsouthcharters.com/ .

Capt Gray called on the radio as he was heading to the dock right as we hooked up to the beast, but I didnt know what we had at the time! I told him we are hooked up but we will be right behind you. I didnt think that it would be an hour and a half before we landed the fish so I had to listen to his mouth as we rolled in about 9:30 to the dock!  He was pissed, he has the Coast Guard trying to reach us on radio, as a joke Aaron told him we stopped to catch mangrove snapper, that didnt help! I watched Gray's face As I pulled the fish out of the fish box, I couldnt tell if he was happy that we had the fish or pissed that HE DIDNT have it!  HA HA!!  He helped me put the fish on the scale. I was saying 150 pounds, he was saying 130! You would know, he was right for once!  The fish weighed 130 pounds!!   What a day!