Aboard the Blue Heron

Note: If you believe that fish are friends, not food--do not read this entry. It ends badly for some friends.

Drift fishing off the coast near Jupiter is always exciting. I look forward to a morning trip on the Blue Heron to catch dinner for the evening. Today's excursion was especially exciting as I caught two King Mackerel to add to the two that my boating companions caught for an exceptionally promising dinner.

George and Fran accompanied me on the four hour adventure on the high seas. After carefully checking the weather for the day, we decided to try to get the trip in before the afternoon storms.

Unfortunately, when we got to the Jupiter location, they had decided not to sail due to too few people, so we headed off to Riveria Beach to make the 8:30 am sailing.

Pelicans were there to wish us fair skies and winds. One got especially close--so I took his picture.

We made the sailing and were underway to the open Atlantic. The day turned out to be very good. Everyone on the boat caught fish. There were a lot of brand new fishermen on the boat and a horde of kids who kept the crew busy. We even had two baby's in strollers aboard who kept their Mom's very busy.

The catch? The most numerous were Bonita followed by the King Mackerel, a rainbow runner and a red snapper. Bonita are not really good for eating and most were thrown back. We had some exciting shark encounters--and I lost three catches (probably all Bonita) to the hungry predators which followed the boat at two stops. One of the sharks was a 10 foot Bull Shark--and he made short work of a number of catches. They were fun to watch, but it was frustrating to drag a fish up from the depths only to have a shark eat it. And while Bonita are a fun fish to land, they require a lot of work.

In the end, the King Mackerel were the best catches of the day--and we got four of them. They are also a lot of fun to land, and I know dinner will be awesome tonight.

As we returned to the dock about 1 PM--the rain started, but the intrepid fishermen were happy to have had such a successful day.

As it was raining on the docks when we returned, I was not able to get a picture with my fish, but I did get one of Fran with his.