Day 2 With Nate

It was Wednesday and day 2 with Nate. CP and KS decided to take the day off and do a little scouting for our Thursday day of exploring and look for a beach with a bar :) This day we were going to target reef fish. We headed north out of Hawk's Nest toward Alligator Point. Most of the western side of Cat Island has a large shallow bank, up to about 80 feet deep, that extends out from 5 to 10 miles off shore. Alligator Point is about a 20 mile run from Hawk's Nest and is a point that sticks out about 8 miles. Nate's "honey hole" was on this point in about 60 feet of water. I was hugging the anchor pulpit at the time but SBS said, while watching the sonar, that there was some unbelievable structure under us. We anchored up without incident and began chumming and fishing. The fish were a little slow to come into our chum slick, but we saw some schools of YT's pass through occasionally. We caught a few of them, a large Horse-eye Jack, and tons of little Strawberry Grouper. Before releasing some of them we had to vent their air sac with a venting tool I gave CJM for Christmas:)

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We decided to move a little and we found the spot. The YT's came in much quicker and thicker. It was at times a "feeding frenzy." We boated 39 YT's, 2 Horse-eye Jacks, a few nice Grouper and GP caught all the grunts in the area.

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After a couple hours on the reef and a box full of fish we trolled our way back in. We saw a few birds working and had a couple hits but no hookups. We did have one hit from a Billfish. You can always tell a Billfish hit because the leader will be scuffed a foot or so in front of the lure as the fish is slashing at the bait with his bill. We all said "goodbye" to Nate, except SBS who planned to flats fish with him on Thursday.

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We definitely had dinner in the barrell!

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We had all the fresh YT Snapper and Grouper filets you could eat for dinner, deep fried by GP & SBS, with several cold Kaliks and rum drinks to wash it down. As Jabet and CJM says..."DELISH!"

CTM