If you haven’t gone fishing before or have fished very little you might enjoy this trip a lot. If fishing is a hobby of yours at home, this trip probably isn’t for you.  We have a boat at home and fish the local lakes quite a bit.  When we are near the ocean I like to go deep sea fishing but my husband tends to get sea sick so I thought this lagoon fishing trip might be a good compromise.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that was a mistake.  Since we fish a lot I certainly know that there’s no guarantee that the fish will bite but what fish we did catch were small and put up very little fight so it was pretty boring for us.  It was certainly nothing we couldn’t have done at home any day of the week.  Aside from that, there were several aggravations.

Part of what attracted me to this trip was the advertised short ride time to where you would fish.  You pay for 4 hours of fishing you want to fish as much of that 4 hours as possible. We were told to be at the dock ready to go at 6 AM.  We arrived about five minutes early.  Just as we were expected to be on time I expected the guide to be ready to go at 6 AM.  If I had known that this was only the first of the aggravations I would have noted the time we finally left the dock but I did not.  I do know it seemed like a long time after I paid the balance owed on our trip before we were finally on the water.

Thankfully the ride time really was short as was advertised but when we arrived at the first fishing spot we weren’t actually able to start fishing.  The guide had to put the tackle on the rods.  We had to sit and watch him slowly pick through a variety of lures, pick one out and then tie it on…...twice.  Now this guide knew exactly where he was going to take us this morning and what type fish we would be trying to catch.  There’s no reason he couldn’t have had those rods ready to use.  In addition to that, he changed the lures once since we weren’t having much luck catching fish.  There were four rods on board the boat.  He could have had two rigged with one type lure and two with another altogether eliminating the down time when he changed the tackle.  Having the rods rigged and ready for fishing before hitting the water is something any fisherman is used to doing and it’s not an unreasonable thing to expect on a booked trip.

After trying a few different spots with little luck the guide decided that he would take the lures off and tie on bait hooks.  Again, he could have gotten the other two rods rigged with hooks while we were fishing the lures.  Then he tells us we are going to catch live bait with a net.  That didn’t take very long but the process of getting the bait into the live well took a very long time.  When the guide pulled the net into the boat the majority of the bait fish were stuck in the net.  It took awhile for the guide to shake them out and they fell all over the floor and seating area of the boat.  We had to chase each of those jumpy little bait fish, snatch them up and toss them in the live well.  When that was finally done the guide proceeded to clean the mess made by the muddy net.  He painstakingly wiped off the floor of the boat and the seats before letting us fish.  I guess it didn’t occur to him that he could do that while we were fishing or better yet, after we got back to the dock.

On the whole I’d have to say I really wish I hadn’t booked this trip.  It certainly wasn’t worth the money.