Sea to Table

Forget Farm to Table...

I will post more about our two weeks at the beach later, but the highlight of the whole trip was probably deep sea fishing on Friday before we left.  Chris' dad has a knack for making money off sports tickets, so he treated himself, JP, Chris and I to a deep sea fishing trip!  (Catrina and Margaret had no desire to go, so they stayed back with the kids.) Every year we enter to win Master's tickets and Master's practice round tickets for Rick from the Master's lottery.  Last year Chris and I won 4 tickets, so Rick bought them and turned around and sold them for a nice little profit.

I had never been deep sea fishing or actually any type of fishing before, and it was a blast!  Actually it was a lot harder to reel those fish in than I thought it would be!  It was hard work!  We got up early pushed off the marina before 6am.  On the way out we caught some bait and then motored out for about an hour to let down our hooks to try to catch some fish!  We weren't going out to catch a blue marlin or anything like that; I was just hoping to catch some Grouper and Red Snapper.  Most of the resturants were serving them as fresh catch, so I figured our chances were good.  But they were closed to private boats- it was only Snapper and Group season for the commercial boats.  Amberjack and King Mackral were what we could catch.

I sipped on my coffee during our ride out...

Sunrise from the boat

Apparently you wear "fishing" belts to help you reel in the fish.  I thought they looked akward, but after wrestling with one fish, I was thankful for them...

I had caught one Amberjack at this point, but it wasn't big enough so we had to throw it back.  The Amberjack was a challenge, but this next fish was something else.  It wore me out.  I kept thinking, this one has got to be big enough...

Look at that determination...

And it was!  I caught a Black-fin Tuna!  It was a strong!  (And we were able to keep the Tuna too)

I caught the fish, but I still don't really want it that close to me..

Gross!  It bled on me!  You can take it away now...

Here's the Amberjack I caught at the end of the trip that we got to keep.  Thankfully, he held it a little farther away from me this time.

We apparently were not getting as many bites as the captain expected.  Well then we saw it...  A SHARK!  There was a shark looming around our boat that was scaring away the fish.  And actually just waiting for an easy breakfast.  Rick was reeling in one fish when the shark ate the whole fish and snapped the line!  A little while later I almost had a Red Snapper in (which we would have had to throw back anyway) when jaws came along and took a big bite!  I ended up reeling in a snapper head...

This shark was certainly raining on our parade.  But wait, who got the last laugh

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That's right...WE CAUGHT A SHARK!  I mean really, how awesome is that?!?  It took Rick, JP, and Chris 45 minutes to wrestle him in...

The whole trip was great and we got a pretty good haul, but that shark was icing on the cake!

We got to keep all the fish we caught.  The first mate butchered them there for us and we took home the meat in plastic bags on ice in a cooler.  Chris and I took about half and Rick and JP got the rest.  We probably have 15lbs or so of fish in our freezer right now.  Sunday night after we got home Chris marinated and grilled some of the Amberjack and it was delicious!!  Kinda fun to catch your own dinner.

Now if Chris would only take up hunting we could get some red meat in our freezer too...