Puttin'em Back

On Friday night, one of the outlaw gang that put out the cobia FADs last weekend, as described in my previous posting, was captured. That sucker was tortured for hours, forced to drink rum and diet coke and eat smoked tuna dip until he cracked and gave up the coordinates of the FADs. With this information in hand, the plan was to do a FAD check on Saturday aboard the Mitchells' (Drew and Bart) 45 Cabo Express, Blue Heaven. But first, there was choring to be done, which was just as well as there was a dense fog Saturday morning that would last most of the day. The chore du jour was dropping the new Lee triple spreader outriggers on the Mitchells' (Pete and Melanie) 54 Hatteras, Anonymous, and waxing them and stringing them with outrigger lines, a task accomplished in relatively short order by a few actual workers seconded by many hangers on and critics.

After lunch, Blue Heaven slipped out through the lingering fog crewed by Captain Drew, assisted by Pete, who was like a cat on a screen door in the role of Radar Watcher and Collision Preventer, with the Freemanator, Eric Songer (the Freemanator's father), and Papa working in the cockpit under the lash of Bart, mate extraordinaire.

Both Fads were where they were supposed to be and, as seen deep in the water from the tower, floating pretty much as intended. But, after only a week, there was as yet no bait to speak of on either FAD and, consequently, no cobia. Disappointed, but determined not to waste the remainder of the day day or the fuel, we decided to engage in a little catch and release red snapper fishing at a spot the location of which could only be pried out of me with copious amounts of rum and diet coke and smoked tuna dip.

Of course, red snapper is closed, and everything we caught was released to live to fight (or breed) another day, save one legal scamp that made the ride home and an unfortunate red snapper gobbled up by a porpoise after release. The snapper were big, and they were testy, so a good time was had by all hands. If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, then here are seven thousand words.