Full Day

It was almost dead calm this morning so Gogie wanted to go out toward the reef for a couple hours to some spots he knows. We started to catch fish right off the gitgo. In just over an hour we had over twenty mutton snapper, nothing real big but keepers. We were in Gogie’s boat and the motor started to act up so we headed back. Out in the open ocean with a dead motor is not the place to be. We grabbed my boat and headed up the creek. It was full tide so I took a little detour and went to the far end of a certain bay where I have found bones on the full tide. At the very end of the bay in shallow water there were three schools of bones milling about. Even Gogie was a bit surprised. After getting my bonefish fix for the day and feeling rather satisfied with myself we headed for the snapper country. This would be a silted in blue hole about 30 feet deep and about 150 feet in diameter and is just nw of spirit cay. This is the place where 2 days ago I hooked a big one on the fly rod and he ate my lunch. Gogie was ready with his 90 lb test hand line. He can actually throw that thing just as far as I can with a spinning rod. Twenty minutes or so went by and nothing. I don’t have a lot of patience with the bottom fishing thing and I suggested we go else where. He said let’s give it another 5 minutes which I knew to be like an hour or so. Just then things started to happen. A couple mediocre muttons and then 4 really big ones. We were on our last bits of bait when Gogie’s line jumped and this fish was pulling so hard it was swinging the boat on the anchor as Gogie had his feet braced on the side and was over handing that line. It was an extra large gray snapper and biggest of the day. Had this fish took my bait on the spinnning rod it would have been a 30 minute tussle. It took Mutton Fish Gogie about 30 seconds.