Left Saturday at noon for a 215 mile drive to the bait shop in Mt. Pleasant SC.
Plan was to buy a couple of pints of fiddler crabs, get the boat ready and fish the next day for sheepshead. I had called this particular bait shop three times before leaving to make sure they had fiddler crabs, three times they said the did but when i got there... no fiddler crabs!
Good thing I left early and knew a couple of other places.
Went to another bait shop and the guy there told me that the grouper fishing was red hot and he gave me some #'s. So in addition to fiddlers I also bought some cigar minnows and squid.
Got up the next morning and had the boat in the water too early. Had to wait for about 30 minutes before it got light and I headed out into Charleston Harbor to find a temperature of 31 degrees and a NW wind of 18 knots with higher gusts
.. brrr.....
Cleared the jetties and headed for the grouper grounds 24 NM to the SE. 10 miles into it, I realized it was way too rough to fish solo, so I turned around and headed for the nearshore reef to go sheepshead fishing. I picked the same wreck that I limited out a couple years ago but could only find a couple of tiny sea bass.
About 10:30 the wind just quit, so I ran to a live bottom spot about 15 NM offshore and found sea bass stacked like bait fish.
Had my limit in about half an hour and played catch and release on light tackle for another couple of hours before heading in. These sea bass were nice sized too as my 15 fish limit weighed just over 40 lbs.
Fished until 3:00 then headed for the hill, boat on the trailer, washed and on the road by 5:30 arriving back in Charlotte at 9:00.
Had something absolutely enormous near the boat. I heard a tremedous splash and turned around to a see a circle of foam in the water that was bigger than my boat by a large margin!
Did not see any porpoises or whales and never saw it again, so I think it may have been a blue fin.