Let me start by saying I have been on many vessels and this was by far the poorest experience of them all. Upon booking this trip, we specifically stated that we did not want to troll, we want to jig… We’ll get to that later.
As we left the inlet the captain (after being told by his very experienced mate not to) tried to take us across 3’ of water on his 36’ vessel at dead low tide with building and breaking waves to save 10 mins of time to the grounds. The boat stalled out in 3’ of water…
After being rocked on the way out (granted the conditions were not great) his FM radio went out and his radar stopped spinning. He asked me to crawl into the console and check the fuses. The fuses we’re fine. The equipment was just beat. When we got the the grounds we trolled for 4 hours with 2 false albacore to show for it.
After convincing him to move to some grounds for jigging he pulls out a chart. This captain had zero waypoints set in his GPS. Punching coordinates in order to get to spots that “had fish.” After jigging for a bit we got into black sea bass. The captain was ecstatic. We we’re not. We did numerous drifts over the same structure piling in sea bass. 13” to 15 inch sea bass. We did not come from NY to fish sea bass. This is a very common fish and we catch them up to 2x the size of these. We tried multiple other wrecks with 1 15” amberjack to show for it.
This “Captain” is a report chaser… Not a report maker. He recited the board of the tackle shop of the fish that we’re being caught. He did not have any time put in to actually know where the fish were. His equipment was also subpar. His big trolling reels weren’t fully spooled,so if we did hook a fish of a lifetime we wouldn’t have landed the fish. His spinning/jigging rods we’re also spooled with crappy braid and did in fact hook 1 quality fish that we lost.
Overall a very poor experience. This captain was borderline dangerous. The mate was great and should have been the captain and in charge.
Let me start by saying I have been on many vessels and this was by far the poorest experience of them all. Upon booking this...
