so sometimes the social networks such as facebook serve a better purpose than just keeping tabs on what ppl are doing. they can help remind you of peoples birthday, help family stay connect with pictures, or in the best case scenario help reconnect with old friends. back in may once we determined this trip was going to be possible i facebook messaged my old high school best bud joey letting him know we were moving to the keys for the summer. joey and i were real close in my last couple years of high school and grew apart once we went separate ways with college. not to mention the kid landed the dream job of his life and moved to florida to pursue it. which is where telling him i was going to be semi local came into play. but to my pleasant surprise joey contacted me while i was out training for robbies. he said he finally checked his facebook and got my message. anyways this dream job he landed is the dream job of every fisherman/woman out there. basically he is the captain of his boss's 48ft fishing yacht. a boss which in short version has to much money to know what to do with and decided he wanted a big toy to play with. so he hired joey and a first mate to run his new found toy. so joe has been a captain for somewhere around 4 years now. he lives on the boat full time, but is looking to save for a house. in more short version joey gets to travel around up and down the east coast captaining this boat for the boss and some of his clients. (i believe his boss is in the demolition business) and the boat enters yearly fishing tournaments with the hope of winning the first place. which joey has been able to come close to and actually place third. they caught a 501lbs swordfish or maybe marlin i forget now. but it is a very impressive fish that when you look at the photos, you wonder how they only got third place with this fish. but the third place prize money was $64,000 that gets split up by ppl involved with the boat; owner,captain,mate. joey ended up coming and staying in the keys for the 4th of july and invited us down to see his boat which is docked in ft lauderdale. and man am i glad we took the ride down there to see him. i also had a buddy from home come down and flew in and out of the ft lauderdale airport which made the trip so much more convenient. which also meant dan was able to join in on all the fun. there was so much great stuff during this trip that im not sure i could type it all. but basically it started like this. we went down thursday went out to dinner for the best hook and cook ive had yet. than we tried our luck for the "moon fish" that come out in the marina behind joes boat. we didnt spend much time but i was able to catch one (its the silver shinny fish) and than slept on the boat to get a bright and early start fishing friday. joey said we would go for king mackerel and some bonita. bonita are similar to tune except they have no eatable value, but joey needed them to use for bait when he comes up to NJ this summer for fishing tournaments. the style of fishing we did was of the sport fishing kind. and while it may of seem a tab boring at times, its the way you go for big game fish. basically we trolled around waiting for the fish to bite. we trolled with about 6 rods in the water at once, and the way it works is you have a rotation. one person gets the first fish, and another gets the second fish, and so on and so fourth. basically you never should be pulling in 2 fish back to back. for typical fisher people this style of fishing is a little boring, waiting around for the rob to bend than just winding the reel to retrieve the fish. but i dunno for me it was so exciting. watching for the rods to bend that pulling in a mystery fish was for me at least intense. especially the way you have to get them to the boat. the fish down here at soooo line shy. which means if you dont use leaders the fish wont bite because they can see the line attached to the bait... and a leader is long piece of clear fishing line that tends to be stronger than the line weight you are using but when in the water is practically invisible to the fish. but the leaders we used with this type of fishing were 60 ft long. so when you wind up to the leader line you have to BY HAND pull in the last 60ft. which means your going one on one hand in hand fighting the fish for the last 60 ft. definitely intense. joey wanted me to experience this so he had the first mate let me do it a few times. and to my luck dani caught a whooper of a king mackerel that required the gaff, so i even got to gaff a fish. which was good practice and a good gaff shot if i do say so myself. at the end of the day we ended up with 4 king mackerel, 3 bonitas, and 2 small blackfin tuna. which makes for a really good day on the water. after that we went back to the marina and tried our luck at tarpon fishing with the fresh catch we just brought back. we got some really nice tarpon to come in but we couldnt land any. we hooked into some but they take you right around the marina pilings and break your line off. dani hooked one and got it to jump out of the water though. than to top off the night we went to joes boss's house that was down the street and took his 23 ft boat out night fishing. the boss's house was sick. it was on the water much like danis shore house, but had thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of boats floating. and the house was something you would see in some home style magazine. the fishing trip at night was very successful in catching fishing but we didnt have to many keepers. only a few close yellow tails and a decent mangrove snapper. which was caught by my lovely girl friend. she killed it on the night fishing trip and had a lot of luck with her spiffy pink rod. all in all the weekend was amazing, we slept on a yacht, fished for 12 or so hours, and shared a few drinks with great company. after looking back i started thinking of all the fish species we caught, so we added them up. we came to about 18 DIFFERENT fish species we caught or hooked into over a 24 hour period. thats gotta be a record or something. thanks captain joey!
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