Sometimes there is more to a fishing trip than fishing, and that was the case during Blind Hog's second outing. The date was Friday, September 21. The crew was your correspondent, the Freemanator and his father, Eric Songer, plus Grasshopper (aka Andrew Dover) from the Outta Here and his roommate, Garrett Simpson. The plan was to depart at dusk, run for an hour or so and then bump along at seven and half knots through the night to meet the rising sun south of the Dumping Grounds about 85 nautical miles out. From there we would troll west toward the Steps and then north and east up the roll down past the Elbow to the Nipple. Which is what we did. But it tells easier than it was.
First came some culture shock. The Hog and its predecessors are accustomed to being crewed on overnight trips by older (old?) men, prudent, deliberate men who watched Bonanza on Sunday nights after The Wonderful World of Disney if their parents would let them stay up, men whose testosterone levels now barely exceed those of their wives. Grasshopper and Garrett, on the other hand, are in their early twenties. Both are good company and excellent fishermen, which is not surprising, given the fact that they are professionals who were just fun fishing with me. But neither is a fancy dresser, a fastidious groomer, or a conscientious nutritionist. I told them to bring whatever they thought they needed for a 24 hour offshore trip, and they climbed aboard with a couple of favorite lures and three cases of beer. As they put away their essentials in every nook and cranny of the boat that would hold ice, I was reminded of the adage that nothing says a man means business like using a shopping cart in a liquor store. And these boys mean business. As you can see below, they look nothing alike, yet somehow both remind me of Bill the Cat. They are the kind of young men that fathers with daughters the world over fear. I like them very much.
At first, all went according to plan. At 10:30, we began our two hour watches, Hopper and Garrett were up first, Eric to go on at 2:30, and me at 4:30. I bedded down on the starboard lounge seat on the helm deck for six wonderful hours of uninterrupted sleep, a luxury on these types of trips. I may have been dreaming of dolphins and lions like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea when I was jolted upright by alarms going off here, there and everywhere. There was no bang, and there was no smoke, but like Apollo 13, something had happened, and we were losing power 60 nm from the house. The bottom machine and the radar would shut down, power up, and shut down again. The autopilot had been knocked off auto. The radios would not transmit because of a low battery condition. If the saltwater washdown in the cockpit was used, the power flowing to the washdown pump knocked everything else off line. I turned off all the electronics but the chart plotter and the autopilot, and I turned off all the lights except the running lights. I grabbed a flashlight and began to look around just as if I knew what I was looking for, which I didn't, trying to act like Jim Lovell, but feeling like Chicken Little.
The first thing I notice is that no one is on watch. It is 12:30, yet I am alone on the helm deck, and there is no one in the cockpit. Two possibilities present themselves to me. Either whoever was on watch fell overboard, probably while trying to take a leak over the cover board in the cockpit while wearing beer goggles, or my two young crewmen are snuggled up together below. I am unsure which possibility I prefer, and decide not to investigate further at the moment because if one of them has gone over the side it is too late to save him, and if both of them are below it might be too soon to disturb them. So I crawl around on my hands and knees with my flashlight, checking breakers, reading volt meters, and turning things on and off in the hopes that I will find something.
And find something I do. I find four bare feet in the beam of my flashlight. Hopper and Garrett have appeared on the helm deck. They have been in the tower, enjoying the evening air, the star filled sky, and a cold beer or four. The tower. A third possibility that did not occur to me.
"We turned on the spotlight and shit started happening," Garrett says matter of factly. Hopper nods in solemn confirmation, a man of many beers and few words.
What had happened was that the house batteries that run the electronics were wired to a 10 amp battery charger, and all the electronics, plus the live well, the helm deck lights and the spreader lights pull close to 40 amps, not to mention the spotlight. The engines were running just fine, and turning out 13.75 volts each, but there was no isolator switch that would allow the power from the engine alternators to charge the house batteries in the absence of sufficient juice from the house battery charger. All these deficiencies have since been remedied, but for the balance of this trip, we minimized the use of power on the helm deck and checked the compass heading for Destin every 30 minutes in case we had to make it home the old fashioned way. But we pressed on, because Blind Hog don't care..
We did find blue water come morning. And we did find some weed lines and occasional flotsam or jetsam to fish on. But the fish were either somewhere else or uncooperative. Eric caught a large triple tail on a spinning rod off a floating bucket. We also caught two small mahi, one so small we tossed it back. Later in the day, a billfish, species unknown, knocked down the long right. Almost immediately, the short left went down too. We assumed it was the billfish, so Garrett dropped back a swimming ballyhoo we were running on the left corner. A wahoo knifed in and cut it off behind the hook. It was almost certainly the wahoo and not the billfish that knocked down the short left and then came back for the unexpected ballyhoo offering, because the skirt on the lure on the short left was chewed up pretty good and the leader was frayed when we checked it. A little excitement, but no cigar
The high point of this otherwise unremarkable day of fishing was being able to check off another thing on Freemanator's bucket list He had never caught a wahoo, and now he has, a nice one too. For him, it was a good trip, and I am happy when he is happy, so it was a good trip for me, the cost of subsequent upgrades to the boat notwithstanding.
The bottom line is that we made it home in good order and in good time in the boat we left in, with no one requiring medical attention upon arrival. And we caught fish. I'll take that every time.
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