I went on a charter boat fishing trip on Wednesday, sponsored by my broker. Boy! Was that fun! We went to Port Fouchon on Tuesday to Steve Tomeny’s Charters (800-259-8452), and slept in one of his “cabins”. There are four of these, and each has a bunk room that sleeps 20 and a similar-sized room with TV, couch, table, chairs, microwave, and two bathrooms with showers.
Steve has four charter boats that easily handle 15-16 people fishing. Based on the one we were on, I guess they’ll sleep 16 also. While we had a day trip of snapper fishing while tied up to oil rigs, Steve also does overnight, sleep-on-the-water trips far offshore for tuna.
We hit the water at 6am for a long day. It took about 45 minutes to get past the “no wake” / “low wake” portion of the canal and into the Gulf proper. After a total of 2.5 hours, we arrived at our first and farthest fishing point — an offshore oil rig.
During the day, we visited either 5 or 6 of these. Generally, we’d fish, catch a few, and then move on looking for more fish. The last stop was the best for me. I caught two Mangrove Snappers around 26-28″ in length and several small Red Snappers that had to go back. The fish were all the way down — free-spool (with a little thumb drag to prevent backlash) to the bottom and then come up about 5 cranks of the reel. That made for a long way to haul them back up.
Other fish that our group of 14 caught were strawberry grouper (ugly fish), a barracuda, a lemon fish, and some “hard tails” (trash fish, used as bait).
We landed back at the dock at 6:15pm. The boat crew cleaned and filleted the fish, then we bagged and iced them. Several of the folks fish a lot and declined to take any fish. Those of us who don’t get out often got a couple ziploc bags of fillets each.
We stopped in Port Fouchon at a restaurant for dinner. There were 11 of us at that time, and they didn’t handle it too well. The classic onion blossom was good. The salad ok. Most of us had either half-and-half shrimp and oysters or shrimp and fish. Dinner took about 1.5 hours. Then, the other 2 hours back to Baton Rouge. We arrived back at about 10pm. What a day!