Ryan and I along with 3 or our dental school classmates (Roy, Jake, and Trey) fished the LDA rodeo this weekend in Grand Isle.
Friday was picture perfect. Flat seas (some leftovers from the tropical crap during the week) but those swells died down during the day. We got up early and busted ass out to Mississippi Canyon.... We made bait at a rig about half way... Caught some perfect hardtails on the sabikis and pushed South. Guess what, 50 miles out and it looked like the water in Bayou Terrebonne.... Nasty brown. We made a few drops for good measure, but jack schidt.
We headed 10 more miles to the Ewing Bank blocks and got to some clear black water... I was the first down with a live hardtail on a cannonball and a big mommajamma took it like candy. Ryan pulled me out about 200 yards and about 2 minutes later the sucker got off. It was a nice one. Felt like a real beast. Next Trey hooked up on a diamond jig and landed a 49.9lb AJ. Nice rig donkey.
I followed up with a medium sized AJ and then Jake with the same.
Roy hooked into several and lost over and over. I hooked a few and handed the rod to Roy as well and we lost them. Finally Trey picked another up on a Diamond Jog and passed the rod to Roy and we landed another nice AJ.
Ryan decided that he'd rather head south and look for better water so he skipped on his AJ.
We went about 10 more miles south and found a floater. The water was getting blueish, but not quite the beautiful cobalt blue that we wanted. We found some big grass patches and pulled up looking for Dolphin but while I was jigging I saw the grass was loaded with Wahoo. We put on some mag. rapalas and made about 5 passes. Every pass we got a Wahoo strike and Trey and I landed our first Wahoos ever! They aren't whoppers, but they were fun. My Wahoo made a highlight reel strike on the pink rapala. It was really exciting to see that sucker skyrocket at that bait.
We picked up 3 small dolphin and all the sudden the patch went cold. We made a few more passes and called it time to go home.
Today we had sticker shock from the gas pump so bad that we decided to fish trout. We got out late and picked up a few small joe trouts and then a hell of a squall blew in with some bad assed lightning. We busted it for Sand Dollar and got the boat tied up in our slip just before it got bad. We had to get some yo-yo out of our slip first. People should know that those slips are all rented on the weekend! Bunch of bucket heads. Even worse, it got so rough in the marina that a bass boat got swamped by the 2-3 footers that were rolling in from the north side of the bay! After the squal and some margaritas at the marina, we made it out to the front on the island and picked up about 20 trouts and some sheepheads (fun to play with) on the remaining live shrimps that we had.
We didn't win any divisions, but it was nice. The night fishermen all slaughtered the YF tunas at Mars. We just aren't comfortable enough yet to make the nighttime Mars trip yet. There were several 75+ lb YF's on the board.
Very strange thing... Not one Red Snapper was caught by ANYONE! The word in Grand Isle is that the Red Snappers are nowhere to be found out of Grand Isle right now. The charter boats weren't even bringing them in. I talked to one guy who said they were running charters 50 miles SE to find snappers in the West Delta rigs. All we had to do was catch ONE red snapper and we would have won the snapper division. In retrospect we should have made the run out East and found some snapper today, but I'm kinda glad we didn't because a Capt who runs a 30' Pursuit said that squall got it so rough offshore (4-5' chop he said) that they had to get off of the boat onto a rig. I'm glad I wasn't in that - Sorry, I will learn to watch my language - today.
LDA fishing rodeo 
