A good day fishing
This is shaping up to be an excellent summer as a buddy's uncle is out of town till Thanksgiving and has given him full access to his pontoon boat, access which we took full advantage of yesterday.
While the boat isn't anything fancy and not suitable to go out deep sea fishing in, it can handle the coastal waterways and allows five adults with multiple coolers, rods and bait buckets to be comfortable and have plenty of space to do our thing.
The fairly shallow draft also means that we can land it on the sandbars and islands which dot the area and easily hop out to go cast netting for bait or fish off of them.
Heading out Saturday morning we had an excellent day as the weather behaved and while we didn't score any keepers, we did pull in a small female blacktip shark, which we released to let her breed and provide a real meal, along with a cobia, which is an excellent eating fish, but was a foot too short and we legally had to release it.
Still, an excellent day with friends on the water.
Even better, we've got permission to bring it down to the Keys for our spear fishing run so that means that we'll be able to go spear and/or line fishing every day we're down there rather than limiting ourselves to just a single day due to the cost of boat rentals.
Ironically enough, this actually means that we're going to save money since even with berthing and fuel fees, along with the extra gas we'll burn towing it five hours down I-95 south, we'll end up spending less money than we normally do since we won't be doing as many tourist attractions.
And just to make things better, spiny lobster season will still be open so we've all got our lobster tags added to our salt licenses and intend to harvest the legal limit every day we can do so.
Life is GREAT!