Today my fishin' buddies were Red Peterson, Ron Mlaskoch, Bill Hobart and Jack Coxe from the Sebring, FL. for a day of slow trolling at Pelican Flats. As usual the weather turned out to be a "should've been here yesterday" scenario. I had spoken to Jack the night before to confirm our adventure based upon the existing 1' at 7 second conditions and the NOAA forecast. As it turned out the increasing winds and seas for the late afternoon greeted us in the morning with heavy overcast and drizzling rain.

We all agreed that they didn't want to waste the drive over so off we went anyway in spite of the deteriorating weather. The first order of business was to get some live bait and one toss of the net had us doing to pogy pick up and after loading the live well we pointed the bow southeast and proceeded to "pound" our way to Pelican flats in the 2' to 4' building wind waves. Heading directly into the wind and waves at least minimized the the spray we had to endure from the wind now gusting to 19 knots.

The day started off slow and our first strike turned out to be a sailfish that I saw bill the bait but when I dropped back to him somehow he was able to get the pogy without getting hooked on the stinger rig. Next we doubled up on a pair of bonito, but, the kingfish didn't happen until after lunch time. We had a pretty good number of strikes and a few missed opportunities and had it not been so rough probably would have limited out on the kings. We threw in a couple of Mahi for variety and had the gaffers mate that we weren't able to get firmly hooked.

As you can see all of my crew including myself are getting a little "long in the tooth" with Jack being the oldest at 77. I know personally, being 55 years young myself, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the the rockin' & rollin' will be paid for this evening and tomorrow with a bunch of aches and pains. By 2 PM we had some rain bearing down on us and we all agreed to call it a day and beat the rain in. As it turned out it was a good call, we were able to take a slow run in at 22 knots in the now solid 3' to 5' seas with an to occasional 6' footer thrown in. We were able to get to the house, clean the fish and get them on the road back to Sebring before the rain set in. Maybe next time we'll be greeted with "calm winds and fair seas".

Final tally for the day:
6 Kingfish to 15#
2 Mahi
3 Bonito