Pine Island Trip #2

Loaded up the family and two good friends of mine for another trip down to Pine Island, we stayed in Bokeelia from Thursday to Sunday afternoon. Arriving late on Thursday, we decided to get a little pre-fishing in before it got dark. Got into some keeper snapper, it made for a nice start. Damn mosquitos tried to pick me up, take me home and eat me.

Early Friday morning we head out, not on the water 15 minutes and got into a school of tarpon, we were not rigged correctly and the 1st two lines we put in the water came back out with straightened hooks. We messed around with them for about an hour chasing them across the flats before it got old then moved on. We hit the trout grounds up by Jug Creek and caught some small trout & snapper but no keepers, we kept some ladyfish for bait latter in the day. At this point it was hotter than Hades, the temp was +/- 94 degress, the water temp seemed in the 80's so we decided to make the run out to Captiva Pass for the deep water. Using some ladyfish and jumbo frozen shrimp we are able to hook up on a bunch of grouper and some blues for about 2 hours. We seen a guy hook into and attempt to reel in the biggets sea turtle I have ever seen. He fought the thing for 20 minutes before everyone realized what it was, it finally broke off when he got it to the surface.

I put in half a day on Saturday fishing the sand bars around the Boca Grande pass, we caught some keeper flounder and hooked into something very large using a 8" grunt, whatever it was it snapped a 60 lb leader like it was nothing. We got a nice bag of fish out there, snapper, spanish mackeral, ladyfish and a few cats. I had them drop me back at the condo for lunch where I preceded to fire up the smoker and load it with brisket and venison shoulder. We ate good that evening.

We decided to head out Sunday morning for a couple of hours before getting back on the road, this time to Smokehouse Island. We got into another school of tarpon but this time we were prepared with heavier tackle. We chased them around for 2 hours but could never get a solid hook up. We kept having these damn dolphins bust them up everytime we got close. We were finally chased off the water by a storm rolling in.