With all due respect to J.R.R. Tolkein, I had to borrow the title of Bilbo Baggins’ memoir of his adventures with Gandalf the Grey, Thorin Oakenshield and the rest of the company of dwarves in The Hobbit. I took a little adventure of my own with a group of friends, old and new, this past weekend. Before we dive into the tale, let me set the stage and tell you a bit about the characters and the lead-up to our adventure.
First, the cast of characters. Our Company included myself, Cliff, Dan, Brian, Doyle and Neil. I’ll leave the last names off to protect the guilty.
Cliff and I have known each other since seventh grade. During middle and high school we were in quite a few classes together and became close friends. We hunted, fished, camped and generally got into mischief together. His family was pretty much my second family and if Cliff was in trouble for something, there was a pretty good chance I was too.
Dan and I met our first day at Young Harris College. Dan lived down the hall from me and, as with Cliff, we had quite a few classes together. We also had many of the same interests and ended up hunting, fishing, camping and getting into mischief together.
At some point after Dan and I graduated from Young Harris, I introduced him to Cliff and since then our paths have merged, diverged, then merged again. Of course, with the advent of email, texting and social media, staying connected has been a lot easier.
Doyle, Neil and Brian are the newcomers to the Company. Doyle and Neil know Dan from work and/or church and Brian was in the same hunt club as Cliff. While I’ve only known Doyle, Neil and Brian for a few days, after spending nearly all day with them for three days, I consider them good friends. It’s pretty amazing how much you can learn about a person after 18 hours in a truck and 8 hours on a boat.
To get to the beginning of this tale, we first have to go back in time a few months. ConnieLou and I were having dinner with Cliff and his wife Thomasa, and Dan and his wife Sherri. As often happens with Cliff, Dan and I, talk turned to fishing and during the conversation, the idea of planning an offshore fishing trip sometime late this summer or early fall was tossed about. For the past couple of years, I’ve been taking at least one trip to a pipe show but because of the Covid unpleasantness, they have all been cancelled this year. Having put back a little cash, it was a good opportunity for a different adventure. I mentioned it to ConnieLou a few days later and she replied “you should go!” That was all I needed to hear and was texting Cliff that I was in before she completed her sentence.
Cliff became our booking agent and travel planner and lined up a tuna trip with Voodoo Fishing Charters out of Venice, Louisiana and lodging at Cypress Cove Hotel, also located in Venice. Our plan was simple, meet up on Thursday morning and drive to Venice, fish Friday, drive home Saturday, then have Sunday to recover before heading back to work on Monday. There was one little detail in our plan that had the potential to bite us in the butt and it almost did…our trip was scheduled during the heart of hurricane season.
As our departure date drew close, an area of thunderstorms over the Bahamas began to get some notice. Over the next few days, the area of thunderstorms began to get a bit more organized and earned itself a new name…Sally, and if you guessed that she appeared to be heading directly for southeast Louisiana, you would be correct.
Needless to say, we were all paying close attention to our favorite weather news sources. As time passed our hopes grew as the storm began to take a turn to the northeast and eventually made landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama on September 16, the Wednesday before our trip. Ironically, Sally made landfall at the same location as Hurricane Ivan, 16 years ago to the day in 2004.
As Sally made landfall, Cliff began checking in with Voodoo and with the hotel to find out if we were still fishing and if we still had a place to stay. Even though the worst of the storm went east, the Venice area still experienced significant rainfall, storm surge, and tropical storm strength winds. Fortunately for us, and the folks in southeast Louisiana, the storm damage there was minimal and we were still on to fish on Friday and the folks with Voodoo assured us that if our hotel was unavailable due to the storm, they would have lodging available for us. Fortunately, we didn’t need it.
We had initially planned to meet up in LaGrange then take I-85 south to Montgomery, then I-65 south to Mobile where we would pick up I-10 west to New Orleans. After the storm the folks with Voodoo suggested that we might want to avoid Mobile and take I-20 west through Birmingham to Meridian, Mississippi where we would pick up I-59 south to New Orleans. The trip would take an hour longer but we would have less chance of having to deal with detours and/or delays due to storm damage in the Mobile area.
Since getting to I-20 would be easier from my house than from LaGrange, we decided Wednesday afternoon that everyone would meet up at our house instead. Cliff and Brian arrived first and Dan, Brian and Doyle arrived a few minutes later. As I tossed my stuff into the back of Cliff’s truck, Cliff and Dan were checking our route on their phones and were surprised to find no reports of road closures or detours around Mobile. We all decided to take a chance and go on down through Mobile to cut an hour off the ride. Fortunately that little gamble paid off. Two stops and about 10 hours later we were pulling into the parking lot of the Cypress Cove hotel.
We checked into the hotel, Cliff checked in with Voodoo Fishing Charters and we headed off to find some supper. There are two restaurants in Venice and one was still closed after Sally passed by. Fortunately, the other was open so choosing a restaurant was very easy. With supper behind us we headed back to the hotel to pack lunches then get some sleep, not that any of us would actually sleep much, before meeting the boat Friday morning.
Four-thirty came early and we met Cap’n Chad and his mate Barrett at the dock, just a short walk from our hotel, at 5:30, well before the sun peeked over the horizon. Barrett helped us stow our lunches and drinks for the day in one of the boat’s coolers and in just a few minutes Cap’n Chad had fired up the 42- Yellowfin’s four 300 horsepower Mercury Verado engines.
We eased out of the marina and once clear of the No Wake Zones Cap’n Chad pushed the throttle controls to the stops and put the boat up on plane. Twenty-five minutes and twenty miles later we stopped at an offshore platform to catch our bait for the day. Catching bait was a pretty simple affair, drop a sabiki rig to the bottom, then jig it back up. Since a sabiki rig has six hooks a drop would often result in more than one baitfish coming to the boat. In less than an hour we had a couple hundred fish in the bait wells and it was time to head out to our destination for the day. To tell the truth, we were all having so much fun just catching bait that we were almost disappointed to have to stop and reel in…but bigger and better things were ahead.
We spent the next hour and twenty minutes running another 65 miles out to an oil rig. We were the first boat there, a big advantage, but several other boats arrived shortly after.
Cap’n Chad and Barrett baited up the rods, set the lines out, threw out several of the baitfish as chum and we were in business. We hadn’t been fishing 20 minutes before we had three tuna hooked up and for the better part of the next two and a half hours we had at least one fish on at any given time. Somehow Cap’n Chad had found just the right drift to keep us on fish. A couple of the other boats got close enough that we could see the frustrated “what are they doing that’s different from what we’re doing?” looks on the other captains and clients faces. In reality we were just lucky. Hurricanes Laura and Sally had stirred up the Gulf pretty well and Cap’n Chad had to make an educated guess as to where the fish might be concentrated. Fortunately for us, he was right.
As we pulled our tenth tuna into the boat we began noticing lightning from then Tropical Storm Beta to the south on the horizon and it was headed our way. Since we had nearly 600 pounds of tuna in the icebox, we decided to call it a day and make the long run back to the dock to clean and pack fish.
By 4:30 the fish were cleaned, packed on ice in our coolers, and it was time to drink a beer or three before supper.
Saturday morning, we loaded back up in the trucks for the ride home. Once home there was still a couple of hours worth of work to do to process the fish into steaks, seal them in food saver bags, and get them in the freezer.
I guess I probably don’t need to say that we had grilled fresh tuna for supper on Sunday. So I’ll just add a picture here instead.
Photo Creds: Cliff, Brian, and Neil
Get Out! 