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 The summer vacation is over an I have arrived back in Michigan. A bittersweet ending as we had a great time and I hated to leave but as the trip came to a close I realized that Salmon season is just around the corner!
 I can say the fishing wasn't spectacular and probably was due to user error rather than the fish. I did my best at fly fishing in the surf and managed to land 2 MASSIVLY small fish. One is a yet to be identified (photo to the left) the other was a pompano (which I didn't photograph as the camera was too far from my spot and I didn't want to kill the fish trying to take a photo). I didn't feel too bad as there were several guys who showed up all week and fished 8 hour days with squid and shrimp and most days they never caught a thing. When the few guys did hookup, it was fun to watch. Several shark were caught by various peeps and a guy on the last day pulled out a 4 ft stingray.
It took him probably 30-40 minutes to land it. When he hooked it, I thought it was a ray as it wasn't moving, just hunkered down on the ocean floor. The line didn't run back and forth like a shark, just stationary with lots of tension. It was a cool site and the kids had a good time seeing what a stingray looked like. Our house was just up the beach and I thought about getting the Boga Grip that Cletus let me borrow and my pliers but the shark would have been dead by the time I came back. I am assuming he was going to put it back; maybe not. In the end, the guy cut the line with a shell or something and put the shark in a grocery bag as it was a little stiff at this point. He came back a couple of day after that and caught other sharks all on the small side. I don't know, just the visual of this guy walking around the beach holding this shark by the tail in a daze trying to figure out what to do was just stupid to me and he was unprepared for what he could catch. On a side note, we always go into Charleston, SC one day and drove in on Highway 17...they have all kinds of billboards saying"Gone...but not forgotten" for the 9 firefighters who were killed in the fire a month or so ago. Here are some pix of the building. It was quite amazing. The strip mall was a crappy thing, and you can see where the roof caved in on them. Say a prayer for the families of those lost...and be thankful we can still go out and cast a fly or throw some bait in the water. 
Get wet...keep it bent... |
