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.

I just reread most of my recent blog entries and also spoke with a friend about some of them…
I am really not as bitchy and whiney in real life as I seem to come across in text. I have been having a great time here in the DC area, but I guess I have only been passionate enough about the negatives to take the time to actually write them down…

Just to give you an idea of some of the other negatives that haven’t made it to the blog yet: I had to travel 40 minutes on 2 subway trains yesterday morning @ 6:30 am and I am not  morning person, the conference hotel where we are staying DID NOT HONOR OUR RESERVATION, and we needed to wash clothes while here and only after putting 2 loads of laundry through thier washing machine did we find out that the only available drying DOES NOT WORK! 

My goal in writing that out was to breeze through the issues and not rant about them, but just writing them got me worked up again, so… For those of you just skimming… Let me restate something that really, really ticks me off… THEY DID NOT HONOR OUR RESERVATION.  They took our reseration, they can see our reservation in thier computer, they just couldn’t keep a room reserved for us… <puzzled /> This is a very bad knock off of a classic Sienfield skit, and its funny to watch Jerry do it, but its not so funny when its happening to you.  If execs in the hotel/rental car industry ever happen across this blog… let me make something perfectly clear to you… If I call and say I will be staying at your hotel/renting your car on some date and you acknoledge that and give me a reservation number, then I expect to show up and get my room/car.  I don’t care that your booked solid and a guest decided to stay an extra day, I don’t care that you oversold some item because you expected a certain number to not show up.  You need to do whatever you have to do to make sure that when I arrive, you are able to give me what was previously arranged for!!!!!!

See! me == cranky.

See, my webhost crashed a while back and I lost my data… Can you believe that i forgot to run backups??!???

Anyway, i was lucky enough to be able to pull some of my posts from the google cache.  I have had them sitting in a text file on my PC for months now…  anyway… they are back up, as best as i could come up with.  I really do intend to start using this blog more now…