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| Fueling Up @ Dreamland on the Way to Dreamland! |
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| One of several triples during the day |
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| A Typical Bay Bruiser |
Think of one of the most exhilirating experiences of your life... All of us could probably generate a mental list of the top five to ten events of our lives. For you, this may include your wedding day, the birth of a child, winning the lottery, being the first man to step on the moon (if you happen to be Neil Armstrong). Well I'm about to take you on a journey down to Destin, Florida that ranks right up there with Apollo 11. On last Thursday I headed south with two of the craziest fishing partners I have ever had the pleasure to accompany in a ocean vessel. The lunar launch began at about 3:00 p.m. on Thursday after work when I met up with two great friends - Charlie Shields and Stuart Row. Stuart, Charlie and I have been planning this trip now for about 2 months and have been looking forward to it with great eagerness. As a matter of fact, from about 72 hours out Charlie was providing me and Stuart with periodic countdown departure time reports via text message. Every time I go on a trip like this, the level of anticipation and expectation grows to almost incomprehensible heights in the days immediately preceeding departure date - so much so that the 9 hour drive to Florida is indistinguishable from when I was just a kid and Dad would take my brother Scott and me to the panhandle every spring to bass fish. Two things matter most on trips like this...fishing & food! So the first pit stop on the trip down centered around locating some top shelf bar-b-que with plenty of local ambiance - Dreamland in Birmingham! This was my first time to Dreamland, and how appropriate since I was on my way to my own personal dreamland...Destin. The restrauant had a great atmosphere with an a good SEC decor and a heavy leaning towards Bear Bryant and Alabama. This particular Dreamland sat right in the heart of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) campus. We all thoroughly enjoyed the ribs, and pulled pork bar-b-que, and topped it all off with a healthy helping of banana pudding. The intensity of the abdominal pain and outward pressure on my lower rib cage was directly proportional to the outstanding quality of the food at Dreamland. After stuffing ourselves, the journey returned to I-65 South and thanks to Charlie's glorious shortcut to Andalusia we rolled into Destin about 11:30 p.m. Along the way down, Stuart got a call from our guide Daniel Pike, owner of Inshore Angler Charters (http://www.inshoreanglercharters.com/home.php) who wanted to delay our departure time by a couple of hours because of forecasted high winds early in the morning. We met Capt. Dan on Friday morning at about 8:45 a.m. along fisherman's wharf to begin the days adventure in a 24' Blazer Bay powered by a four stroke 225 Yamaha . The weather could not have been any better if we had ordered it, beautiful blue sunny skies with a high in the low 80s. We started off catching our bait, atlantic croakers (Micropogonias undulatus) using dual hook rigs baited with cut squid in Marler bayou. In about 45 minutes we had about 30 croakers and were ready to get serious. Our first spot was at the Destin bridge about three pylons to the east of the main channel, and we moved around anchoring the boat so that we could fish the various pylons of the bridge. The most productive spot turned out to be one section to the east of the main passage way or as Charlie so fondly referred to it..."the left metal". This hole produced a good number of high end slot reds, and a few over. Capt. Dan also shared his secret deep hole with us which was west of the main passageway and further north just off Crab Island. This hole also produced a good number of redfish, most of which were larger on average. Capt. Dan said this is where he had caught most of his 40+ pound redfish, so we were more than glad to give it a fair shake. Although it didn't cough up any 40 pounders it did produce more 8 to 15 pounders than these three good ole boys from East Tennessee ever dream of seeing. The fishing day ended around 3:00 p.m. with us taking our fattest three 27"redfish to the 2010 Destin Rodeo for the weigh-in. The rodeo rules require that all fish be gutted and then weighed, our best redfish of the day was 7 pounds even which was good enough to take 1st place in the Bonus Awards Division (i.e. the big money division!). Last year's winning redfish was 7.4 lbs, and this year the 1st place redfish in this divsion at the end of the month with take home $6000! So we were pretty good about our chances of at least placing one of the top three money spots. Overall we wound up catching over 30 redfish all between 7 and 15 pounds. It was one of the most amazing days of fishing I have ever experienced.
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| Me, Miss Destin and our 1st Place Redfish |
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