The Reef

In the mid 80's today.  As I sat on the back porch drinking my morning coffee, the sun was already very hot beating down.  I could just feel the boat's fiberglass heating up.  I could hear cracks and pops as the fiberglass expands from the heat of the sun.  These last few days have been so hot, that by mid afternoon, our 25 foot boat is almost 30 feet long.

It wasn't too windy today, so we headed out to the reef with the thought of snorkeling.  However, as a backup plan, I took some shrimp along too.  The man-of-wars were thick again, so we opted to fish instead of get in the water.  This m-o-w had an interesting fish following along.

  Actually, we hardly needed to get in the water to see the bottom.  Here's a shot in about 20 feet.  You can see the shadow of the boat.

 

As we cruised along, looking for a spot to fish, we went out into 50' of water, and could see the bottom there also.  Pam saw a 5' long shark swimming on the bottom, I saw a sea turtle about half way down, and then I saw a sailfish just below the surface.  I stopped and made a few casts, but evidently, he didn't want shrimp for lunch today.

I caught several small yellow tail snappers at first.  Beautiful fish, but small.

 

I brought three fishing poles with me to Florida for salt water fishing.  A medium, a light, and an ultra light.  I had been using the light pole, but thought since I was catching a lot of small fish, I'd switch to the ultra light rod.  That would be fine, unless I hooked a grouper.

 

I also caught some grunts, hogfish, and this yellow jack.

At the end of the day, I got into a school of spanish mackeral.

Since our boat has a roof over the back porch, it's not a convenient spot from which to fish.  However, I have determined that I prefer inconvenient fishing over shoveling snow.