We loaded up 10 hungry anglers for their annual fishing trip, and departed at 8pm Sunday evening, with an eta of 7am at the W Garden banks. After watching an amazing lightning storm ahead of us for 3 hours, we got slammed by a huge unpredicted (for the area, on all my forecast sites) front at 230 am. The first hour of the storm was better than sustained 60kt winds.Thinking it was a bad squall, we spent 4 hrs trying to get out of it. In those 4 hrs we travelled 9 miles. Finally got to tequila, and took a line on the rig to ride it out. While waiting we caught 6 bft, 20 cuda, and a 24# almaco.

At 10 am it had called to 5-6 so we picked up and continued on our way. Arrived at the gardens at 2pm and put down a good hour of troll... for nothing but cuda bites... we began drifting for grouper, and even though the drift was too fast to be very successful, 5 drifts produced a small mess of mixed bottom fish including a 30# African pompano and a 100# black grouper.

We arrived at nancen just before 10pm, and saw some signs of life. The bet bite was good, but after 3 drifts we had only hooked one yft. We moved to boomvang at midnight, an had a short choppy yet bite the rest of the night, averaging 2 yft per drift. On the morning troll see popped 4 more nice ones, for a total of 26 of our 30.

Very tough trip, but considering we lost more than 8 hrs of our fishing time, it turned out ok.

Tough trip but nice job hanging in there and scratching out a nice haul. 100# blackie WOW!That's a bucket list fish for me.

I'll be on the 10/19 48 hour with y'all and can't hardly wait till then.

Nice post and a great haul. Good job.

Nice fish. Good job.

It was a blast to be on the boat with you capt. Your crew worked their hind ends off. Loyd and John can't be beat
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