Ocean Fishing...

Oldest chooses for his birthday (13) an ocean/salmon fishing trip. Yikes!! I'm as far from a fisherman as possible. Golf? Baseball game? Tennis? Sure. Fishing? Nah.

Great salmon season this year.

Get up at 3:45 am to get to the dock at 5:15. 2 hour boat ride under Golden Gate Bridge to deep sea. Fortunately, fellow fisherman are GREAT guys. Willing to share, teach, patient. Captain and deckhand are amazing, keeping 24 lines in the water without more than a handful of snags. Rigs are so easy, just snap ready made live bait to snap on line and drop the bait with 5 lb sinker.
Everyone only trolling 25-40+ feet down, boat gets fishing limit in less than 4 hours (48 fish). My boy landed 4, two were released back, largest was probably 20 lbs. I got one for about 15 lbs (first fish landed ever.) Largest caught was probably 30 lbs or so. Everyone got to take 2 fish home.

Hints? Take Dramamine (no seasickness).

Got home at 4 pm and wiped out for rest of the night (2 hour nap) and thankfully Missus divvies up salmon to neighbors.

 

Fresh salmon was awesome that night (thanks again to my better half).

Although Captain Jim and Christian the deckhand were awesome, I'm not scheduling my next trip anytime soon. Too early.

 

Growing up in South Jersey, we used to go out of Barnegat Light for blues all the time.
Only sick one time, but that trip also included eating an eighth of hash and drinking a 12 pack.

 

Co-worker's bachelor party was a charter trip into the Gulf of Mexico. Bagged dozens of grouper and consumed much beer. Then we took the fileted fish to a local restaurant and they cooked it up for us. One of the coolest things I've done in my life. It cost about 1200 bucks, but we split it 8 or 10 ways, so it was worth every penny.

 

I requested (as a grown up) a deep sea fishing trip for my birthday. My mom gave me the cash for the trip folded up inside a deck of Go Fish cards made for kids.

The tripwas awesome and one of the best birthdays I ever had. We were able to bring home 5 red snapper per person. Had a enormous fish fry a few weeks later. Good times.

 

If anyone is planning a trip like this, I would advise against the party-style charter boats unless that's all you can afford. I've never caught anything worthwhile on a boat with 40 of my closest friends. Private charter is the way to go, but much more expensive.

 

We did pretty good on the charter style. But that might be because half of our boat was full of a group of firefighters on a guy's weekend and they were all hung over and not fishing. Myself and the one I was with caught way more than 5 fish each. But everyone on the boat got to take the maximum of five home. So we pretty much caught the fish the throwing up firefighters didn't catch.

 

Took a deep-sea charter out on the Atlantic once, but we had to turn back because of rough waters. Half the people were hanging over the sides of the boat and yakking their guts out, and that's a sight you'll never forget. 8) ----->

 

It was pretty rough seas early in the morning on the one we took too. The first guy to catch a fish that morning was literally hurling over the side as he reeled it up. It takes some serious rough seas to make me seasick, but I was close that day. It calmed down after a couple of hours though.

 

One of the regrets we had with Katrina was that we had to throw out about 5 pounds of redfish fillets that a friend of my wife had given her after an excursion in the Gulf. We tried to grill as much of the meat in our deep freeze as we could, but we ran out of charcoal and we didn't have any oil to fry it on the coleman stove. Real bummer.