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I am so tired right now!

My arm is killing me! But more on that later…  We had a great fishing trip!  This was my first experience fishing on the gulf and it was a good one.  We left out of Matagorda Bay Saturday morning @ 6:30 am.  I believe we went approximately 52 miles off shore at one point during the day.  We did a lot of riding.  Our guide had some preferred fishing areas, and we also spent a bit of time looking for anchored shrimp boats.  Appearantly the fish we were after are attracted to the many things that the shrimpers catch, so they usually have good fishing around these boats.  The first boat we stopped to fish at had a bunch of activity.  There were several sharks and many pilot fish hanging around.  Unfortunately these fish and sharks were not letting us get our lines down to the tuna, so we didn’t catch anything worth keeping.  I think I did more touristy sight-seeing at this stop than fishing, but it was still great.  I should point out here that the story may be a bit dis-juncted and out of order, because I was pretty excited for the first half of the trip and very exhausted for the rest, so I am not sure I got all of the details correct.  At one of our stops early in the day, it might have been this first one, one of the guys on the boat, G. W.,  hooked a shark and he fought the shark for a very long time.  I didn’t catch exactly what happened, either the shark cut or snapped the line, or it was cut on board since we had no intention of actually catching the shark…  It was a good fight, tho.

We went to a different spot a bit later and were trying to fish for another fish whose name I can’t remember.  The guides showed us how to attract this fish, but I don’t think we actually caught any.  I think this is when Steve hooked into something big.  We never actually saw this one.  Steve fought it for a good half an hour before needing a break and passing the reel to Robert.  Robert continued the fight for 20-30 minutes.  This is the kind of thing you can’t make up.  The rod was missing the porcelin insert in one of the guide holes (sorry if I am not getting terms right here!). We could actually see the line starting to fray and come apart.  Then after this long battle, the knob ripped off of the handle on the reel, so Robert couldn’t reel anymore.  The guides suggested trying to tie another reel to the broken one’s line so that we could try to reel this fish in, but the minute they touched the line, it snapped!  We never even saw it!

One of our next stops was to try to catch some red snapper.  This was exciting!  It seemed like we had at least three people pulling in fish at the same time at least 2 or 3 times.  It was a great spot.  The only downside to pulling these snapper in was that they were 200 ft below on the bottom, so when you hooked one, you had to reel it a very long ways! Sometime around here, I got a big bite and something took my line really hard.  I fought it for at least 15 minutes before we got to look at what it was, a 6 ft shark!  It probably took another 10 minutes to get it up to the surface.  I was able to pull it up to the boat twice for photo ops before it got off the line.  What a fun experience that was!!!

I was pretty exhausted for the rest of the trip.. and I still am.  I will write more later.