MONDAY, DECEMBER 03, 2007
Gagilicious Day
By Scott Erickson
NCW member Scott Erickson & Crew Land A Gaggle of Gags!
We had been planning a big day on the water for Thursday since the beginning of the week with several boats and lots of fisherman because the long range weather forecast was finally favorable for the North Carolina coast. Of course Wednesday the forecast was changed to predicting nastiness and then current conditions were not pretty on the high seas so we scarpped our fishing plans.
However, at about 8:30 Thursday morning Tanner Gray and I both checked the weather and found it to be do-able and we planned to hit the water last minute. I called Taylor Perdue knowing that he could go fishing at the drop of a hat (retired and loving it) and told him to grab his new rod and meet the Reel Dream Team at the ramp.
We were on the water by 10:00 and the fog was rolling in; a strange occurrence mid-morning for Topsail Island. We made it out through the inlet without incident, punched some numbers into the GPS for a secret Grouper hole about 18 miles offshore, and headed off into big 5 foot rollers. The further offshore we got, the steeper the rollers got, to the point where they weren’t rollers because we kept falling off the backside of these big waves when we got going to fast. We adjusted our speed and made for a comfortable, easy going ride to the fishing grounds. Just before we reached our honey hole we entered a thick fog bank and found the seas to be a washing machine with waves from several directions and the swell from yet another. It was a really strange feeling.
I found the ledge on the sonar, bait on the ledge, figured out our drift course in the jumbled seas, and told the guys to drop lines to see if anything was down there before we went through the effort of dropping the anchor. Tanner’s bait may been on the bottom for a couple of seconds before his rod bent over double and up came a nice Gag Grouper.
Read the complete story and see all of the pictures in the Fishing Report Message Board!
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