Update from my previous post. We struck out again on sat and headed home early sun as planned. We’ve been fishing together for about 3 years now and are still a young team with high hopes to compete with the best of the best. We learned a few things this week we will use to help us in the future fishing unfamiliar water. Here’s how the week went.
Sat 4/10 - We left Wilmington at 4pm planning to drive all night and be in fort pierce for breakfast Sunday morning. Coming across the Isabelle Holmes bridge (haven’t left town yet) we had a tire come off the front axle on passenger side. I torqued the lug nuts the previous weekend to 145 ft lbs someone tried to steal a trailer tire there’s no other way all the lug huts backed off. Replaced the hub and put on a spare tire and we’re off again
Sun 4/11 - we make it to Daytona beach for breakfast at ihop at 6am. We get to fort pierce around 9am and can’t check in at our house until 3pm. We do some errands like getting fishing license, fill the boat with fuel, figure out beat place to launch the boat, and just killing time. Around 2 o’clock we launch the boat. The owner and myself are on the boat while one of our other guys is taking the truck and trailer to the house. A storm producing 75 mph wind and sideways rain hit us before we could get the boat tied up at the VRBO. We tied the boat up at some random persons dock and wait the storm out. Other than that Sunday was pretty uneventful.
Mon 4/12- We found a power steering leak on the center engine and we get up that morning with plans to fix that and kind of take it easy. Come to find out the power steering was leaking in 2 different places and no one had the part we needed to fix it. We figured out it only leaks when the steering wheel was at full lock so we buy a case of fluid and just keep the reservoir topped off.
Tues 4/13- First day of fishing. We push off the dock Tuesday morning with hope of find bait. King mackerel down there love blue runners and you have to catch them on rod and reel with sabiki rigs. It’s slow going catching them that day. We bait fished for about 8 hours and caught 10 baits the first day.
Wed 4/13 - The little hit of bait we caught the day before is not nearly enough so we leave Wednesday morning with hopes of filling the live well with blue runners. No such luck. I think we caught 6 more. Frustrated we head back to the house to make a game plan. We call around to some locals we know and get some bait lined up for us to purchase. $150/dozen but we had to have them. We ended up burning $600 worth of gas bait fishing and then on too of that had to pony up another $600 for 4 dozen baits.
Thurs 4/14 - We finally get to go fishing. We bought some gps numbers and get them loaded on the GPS on the boat. We just spot hop looking for life and marks on the bottom machine. We ended up catching a few very small king mackerel that day. We felt good going into day 1 of the tournament.
Fri 4/15 - First day of the tournament. Shotgun gun start at 7:10am for open class boats. Very foggy that morning we fished close to fort pierce and didn’t catch a single fish. Learned fri night the bite was south about 45 miles. Our game plan for sat was to either run north 80 miles to the 72 degree water or run south as far we had numbers to fish and work our way back.
Sat 4/16 - We did not make the 80 mile run one way to the north we put the gps on the furtherest numbers we had to the south. About 50 miles from the inlet. We can run out front of 90% of the boats and we did this morning. Ran wide open in the ocean at 69 mph for the 50 mile run. We get there and get baits in the water and marking good on the bottom machine. About 20 minutes later everyone else shows up and there’s 80ish boats fishing the same area. We worked out way back to the north towards out home inlet without a king mackerel bite.
Main lesson learned was given the opportunity to buy bait and have time to pre fish we will just pony up and buy bait from the start and spend our time/fuel finding fish.
We did get our plaque for winning division 9 last year.
The two guys on left fish with us some, owner/captain is second from the right and I’m on the right.