We headed out around 8:00 (had to wait for the tide to rise) and took Sister's Creek out. This is a great shortcut into the harbor that unfortunately a lot of people (especially sail boats) do not use, claiming its too shallow. But after navigating it with the dinghy, testing the depth at low tide, and talking to a few locals we decided it was just fine. The tide was just coming in and at its lowest point it was 7.5 ft, plenty of room for most boats, and by taking this route we didn't have to wait for the bridge to open or take our outriggers off.
We got out to the light tower, which was in the gulf stream, and it was a bit rockier than we anticipated (4-6 ft) so we headed over towards the Seven Mile Bridge. I drove while chip set up a few rigs, but before we were going to use them, he set up a sabiki rig so we could try and catch some bait by the bridge pilings. These waters can be treacherous if you are not familiar with the area. You can go from 20 ft to 2 ft in a flash, so I was not too comfortable maneuvering the boat, so we traded places. He backed the boat up to the first piling and I dropped the hook. We drifted away from the piling in a swift current......no bait. We moved down to the second piling, same thing......then the third. We decided this was not the place or the way to go about this, so Chip set up a few trolling lines and I drove the boat to the other side of the bridge and out through the channel markers. Had a couple knock downs, but nothing in the boat yet. We saw a few boats about a quarter mile away and could hear them on the radio, they were catching a few yellow tail snappers, well the ones that the barracuda's weren't taking from them, but unfortunately we could not get the WINDFALL to where these other boats were, they were smaller boats and its was too shallow for us. So we trolled out until we got parallel to the inlet at Sister's Creek and turned in that direction. I maneuvered the boat through the sea of lobster pot markers (I have been calling them crab pot markers all along, but was politely corrected by one of the locals) while Chip stayed down in the cockpit. At one point I became a bit uncomfortable, the lobster pot markers were getting thicker, so we traded places. We did manage to snag one pot, and lost a planer/spoon combo before we could unsnag it. By this time it was around 1:00 so the captain told me to wind 'em up and we headed in.
Once in Sister's Creek we put out one line with a sinker and trolled around for a while, but nothing was taking what we were offering. *sigh* We headed back to the slip, washed off the boat and headed out to run a few errands. Our next door neighbor here is a very nice lady named Cindy, who lives on her sailboat with her son Chris. Cindy teaches at the local high school and she & her son walk to school everyday. ......well this morning we found a small Ziploc bag on the back of our boat with the key to her car and a note telling us to use the car at our disposal, that she wouldn't be home until 5:30 and didn't want us to be without wheels! What a nice thing to do! So we took her up on her offer and used the car to go to West Marine, Home Depot, grab some lunch and to go to the grocery store, where we could load up on heavier items we needed and wouldn't have to carry them back to the boat! Since Cindy's car was already full of gas (we wanted to fill it up to say thanks) so we bought her a cooler and filled it with ice & beer (her idea).
When she got home we had just finished putting the groceries away and were heading up to the Dockside for a bite to eat and invited her and her son along. A great ending to a great day! Of course it would have been a better day if we had caught fish, but it was a learning day for us, and we have plenty of time to fish before we leave!
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