Fishing Trip

I wanted to talk about the trip I took about three weeks ago. It was a guys trip to Gulf Shores, AL to go deep sea fishing. Me and 8 other guys from work went down there on a Friday night and came back Sunday morning. The morning of the actual fishing day (Saturday), we awoke to a huge thunderstorm and torrential rain. We were supposed to meet the captain at the dock at 6 am but he had called and told us to wait an hour and then call back because it was raining too hard. The rain did slack some but never did stop completely. When we got to the dock, the captain met us there and asked if we really wanted to go out. We told him we were there to do some fishing so if it was safe, then let's do it. We, of course, knew of the risks of getting sea sick so we took precaution and each had a scopolamine patch on. We set out with it still raining and the trip out wasn't so bad....until we lost sight of land. Once that happened, there was nothing you could really focus on so it was easy to get carried away by the swaying of the boat. Oh yeah, did I mention there were 7 foot swells? I looked out at the horizon at one point and saw a huge base of black clouds that looked like a wall cloud of a tornado. The deckhand (Drew) told us it would probably behoove us to go inside the cabin while we went through that storm. So we did and really regretted it. I started to get really light headed and my mouth started watering and my stomach was turning. Before I puked, I got outside and was able to get a little better. Two guys were not so fortunate. They puked like crazy. Drew told us he had only ever seen one person get sick while wearing a scope patch and we had two. Once we stopped to fish, I felt fine. And boy did we catch some fish. Amberjack and Grouper were closed but we caught a ton of snapper and king mackerel and a fish Drew called albacore jack. It's in the amberjack family but not quite the same fish. Robert, one of the guys on the trip, caught a HUGE amberjack. He weighed at least 50 pounds and Robert worked on reeling him in for a good 30-40 minutes. Drew picked him up to his chin and his tailfin was dragging the deck. After the picture was taken, Drew dumped him overboard. It was really depressing, especially for Robert, to work that hard and then let the fish go. Oh well, it was still fun. We ended up going about 42 miles out to sea and the sun shone for about the last hour of fishing. Other than that, it either rained or was very overcast. Not too bad really, because it wasnt so hot. It took us 3 hours to ride back into shore and once we got back, we had Drew clean the fish for us and said we caught about 400-500 pounds of fish total. I was able to take back 4 gallon size baggies of filets back with me. I had a cookout for family (about 12 people) and still had 2 gallon and 4 quart size bags of fish left over. We had an amazing time and I would love to go back and do it again. In my next post, I want to talk about the trip Erika and I just took to Dismals Canyon near Phil Campbell this past week to celebrate our 7th anniversary.