Two trip reports in one... I had chatted a bit with Lamont and talked through the options for the half-day trip he had planned for himself and his girlfriend on Saturday, 08/28. What I didn’t realize was that this trip would be a total surprise to her, so she had no idea what was going on until I greeted them at the dock. Fortunately, it was a good surprise. Despite having never been ocean fishing, she was a great sport and definitely up for the experience. I had planned an easy day, trolling for Spanish right along the beach. To make it better, the wind and seas were perfect. We rolled out of Topsail inlet, set the lines out just past the sea buoy, then turned back inshore toward Lea (Hutaff) Island. I was running three 00 Clark Spoons on #1 planers, along with a 3 ½” drone spoon on a #3 planer… just in case. I’ve picked up a number of kings this way, while trolling nearshore for Spanish. Unfortunately, there were no kings this day, although something did cut off my planer. It’s not easy to write up a very exciting description of Spanish mackerel trolling, but we picked up our first fish just along the shoals south of the inlet. I made some circles, and we lost a couple and caught two or three undersized fish before the bite dropped out in this spot. We repeated this pattern down the beach, zigging out to about 35 feet of water before zigging back in to around 15 feet, hunting the fish, and circling the area whenever we picked up a strike. The odd thing was the ridiculous number of 10” and 11” fish we were catching (they have to be 12” to be legal). I could hear other boats on the radio complaining about the same thing. Usually, if you’re getting little ones close to the beach, you can find bigger ones in deeper water… but it didn’t seem to matter how deep we went. Little fish everywhere! We easily boated over 30 fish between Topsail and Wrightsville, and we lost a bunch more. At the end of the day we had 9 keepers and a couple of happy customers. I thought we were done for the weekend, with no booking on Sunday, so I gave the boat an extra scrubbing and packed everything up to take home. I planned to spend part of the day reorganizing the tackle bucket, fixing rigs, and generally giving my gear the TLC it hasn’t really had lately. I was already having an icy beverage and heading for the shower when I saw a notification on my phone. Someone wanted to book a half day for Sunday, 8/29. I would be lying if I didn’t say I considered declining the booking. It had already been a long weekend, and I was pretty whipped. The boat had already been stored. On top of that, the fishing has been really tough. But I decided to respond to the guy and just find out what they were looking for. I’m glad I did. Josh and Curtis are a couple of Coast Guardsmen, stationed over in Jacksonville. Josh’s girlfriend, Amanda, would be joining them. I told them how hard the nearshore fishing has been lately, with Spanish pretty much the only game in town, but he said they really didn’t care too much. As Josh put it in his reply to me, they were just looking for a nice day on the water. I decided to take the booking and get them out there. When we met up at the dock, the whole crew was just as laid back in person as Josh sounded in our messages. I could not have asked for a prettier day, with flat-calm seas and a nice, offshore breeze. The boat was just being put in the water, so we were off and running. We fished basically the same plan as the day before, setting out the lines just out of the inlet, then working inshore and along the beach. It took them a couple of tries to get the hang of reeling in the Spanish without snatching them out of the water and de-hooking them, but we were in the fish reasonably quickly. The action wasn’t quite as good as the previous trip, and there was still an inordinate number of undersized fish, but the crew more than made up for the slow action with humor and competition. At the end of the day, they took home 6 fish, enough for a good dinner or two.