All this time that I’ve lived in Florida and yet somehow I’ve managed to never go saltwater fishing. I had a friend from Kentucky coming to visit for the weekend and he suggested spending Saturday afternoon at sea. I reserved a spot on a large charter for the group to depart at 8 AM. This proved to be a mistake as four alarms failed to awaken us.

Fortunately the aftermath of a late Friday was able to be shaken by 7:39AM and thus provided barely enough time for me to call and cancel the reservations for a refund. The charter had no other availability for the day so we browsed the internet and eventually found another charter in Clearwater that was departing at 1 PM. This allowed the group some time for breakfast and a little flea marketing before setting sail.

When we arrived the first thing we noticed was that our fishing boat was docked just a few spots down from the boat we had originally planned on using. After looking it over it was clear that the new boat was more suitable for the day ahead of us so we were happy with our error.

We arrived early enough to explore the boat and mess around before hitting the high waters and Heather decided she was hungry enough to try a little bait. Not really, but I’m quite sure she disgusted the bait boy. Which by the way, being a crew member on one of these fishing charter boats is probably the closest thing one can achieve to living the dream.

Should we happen to forget we are in one of the most touristy towns of Florida there were constant reminders of gimmicky boats trying to capitalize on our money. Such as this Jaws like cruise liner:

I was afraid that the day was going to get rained out as I had constantly checked the weather all week long. The weather indicated storms during the day in Clearwater but due to the messed up weather patterns of the Tampa Bay area you never know what is going to happen and somehow we managed to leave the storm ashore.

When we finally got to the captain’s honeycomb and were allowed to drop our lines in, the weeks anxiety finally came to an all time high. Before I could even drop my line in the water someone had already caught something. Maybe this was going to be a great day after all!

So I dropped my line in and I sat there. And I sat there. And I sat there. All passengers except Heather and I seemed to be bagging nemmatoad after nemmatoad. My friend Brian caught 5 or 6 fish, I lost count, he even caught a shark. So I decided to post this picture of his smallest catch of the day:

We had the great luxury of sharing our boat ride with some of the most fratastic brooks brother wearing wonderboys of all time on this particular Saturday. One of which even tried to steal my pole until I sat him straight. Anyways, after there shenanigans and beer shotgunning they of course were the ones to catch the days biggest fish. I believe it ended up being a 45 lb Cobia.

The captain came over the loud speaker to let us know we only had about 5 minutes of fishing left so I let the line loose and drag for half the reel. This proved to be the successful strategy because 20 seconds later I had my days first catch.

I threw him into the fish holocaust ice box and we headed back to land. The charter will clean the fish and put it in a bag for you which is nice. Especially since I don’t even have the utensils to do such a thing down here.

As we stood waiting for our fish to get butchered up, some random stranger (definitely from New Jersey) came up to me and offered me his stringer of fish. With the combined stringers of fish we were looking at some good eatings for dinner.

The bait boy was cleaning the fish for us and throwing the scraps to the little intelligent creature posted up in the marina waiting himself for some good eatings.

The captain let us know if we took our fish down to the restaurant on the end of the marina they would fry it up for us and put it with some sides for $8 bucks a plate. Nice! We didn’t even have to wait on the drive home to eat our days catch plus we wouldn’t have to stink up the apartment.