Well this past Saturday the 28th of July was a pretty good day fishing wise. It started out a little rough, bad planning on my part, needed gas in the boat, trying to get bait, get everyone organized (myself included). Finally got all the pieces of the puzzle to line up and got the boat in the water about 7am at the Navy base and started making our way out the pass to the gulf. The ride out through the jetties was pretty smooth, but the 1-2 that was predicted was more like 2-3 with the occasional 4-5. I debated on staying out but after some deliberations with my friends Mike and Kelly and Kelly's Mom, Gail, from Wisconson we decided to give it a try. We put the cigar minnows out in our usual spread with 2 on the surface, one with an 8 oz weight and one with a #2 planer and away we went. Things were real slow for the first couple of hours, a couple of short strikes and that was it. I was beginning to feel bad for my guest from the North but she was being a trooper and said that she was doing just fine and was glad to be enjoying the beautiful sunshine and water that we have here on the Emerald coast.
I kept trolling around trying to find the bait fish and finally found some about a 1/4 of a mile off of Schooners Beach Bar. As we trolled around we caught the first of 3 chicken dolphins of the day. Finally starting to get a little excitement in the boat now, Gail is happy she can eat a little Mahi for dinner and I was just glad we didn't get skunked. So I start making slow circles around the GPS points that I had marked and now we start getting some drags singing. Boated some nice spanish mackerel, and had a few remoras decided they wanted to see the inside of a boat.
Things were starting to slow down a little when all of a sudden we see a nice Kingfish crash one of the surface baits and procedes to strip the line off the reel. We knew it was a big fish and so we started clearing the other lines, but not before the one with the planer got cut but the other line... Oh well we still had this nice king to contend with, so we got everything else out of the way and fought this one up to the boat. After a couple of missed gaffs and a few more drag stripping runs we finally got him on the boat and all of him that we could into the 150 qt cooler. He measured out at 46 inches. Biggest one that we had ever caught. After a few hi fives it was back to business of rigging poles and setting the bait spread back out. A little while later we got another king on the only spinning reel we were trolling with. Kelly goes and grabs it and starts crankin him in whe n the handle broke off the real. We tried to fix it but to no avail so she put the rod back in the holder, tightened the drag, and spun the bail by hand. This king wasn't quite as big as the other one but there probably aren't too may people out there who have reeled in a 38 in King without a handle. Now mind you this is not a fast way to things, it took her almost 30 minutes of one turn at a time. But it finally made its way into the box with the others for a date with the filet knife.
All in all we wound up with 2 nice Kings, 3 spanish that we kept, 3 chicken dolphin, 2 nasty remoras, and a bonita that was about an inch longer than the cigar minnow that it was trying to eat. Plus many pictures for Gail to send back to Wisconson and make all her friends jealous with.
Sunday on the other hand was exactly the opposite, I took my wife out ( her 1st time on our boat) and did everything exactly the same as Saturday and couldn't catch anything. 2 Shortstike and that was it. Never did find the bait fish again, and tried all the way from the beach out to the whistle buoy. Oh well I guess that's why its called fishing and not catching. There is always next weekend
Report out of Panama City Beach 
