The Middle Grounds

Hello!! Just checking in. We haven't been doing a whole lot of fishing lately, as you might have noticed. We did get out weekend before last though. We went out to the Port Tampa Reef. It's a man made reef of concrete blocks that was dumped there to create a habitat for fish and a fishing spot for us fishing junkies.

The weather was absolutely beautiful. We couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day. It was a bit windy but the wind was out of the North so the Tampa Bay waters were protected. The reef is located right, smack, dab in the middle of Tampa Bay. It's right in between Port Tampa and the Wheeden Island Power Plant. I've named it "The Middle Grounds." What's kind of funny about that is that the real Middle Grounds is about 100 miles off shore and if you've been reading this blog for any length of time you know how likely it is that we would EVER go 100 miles off shore in our boat. Ha.

We found the reef some time ago and we marked it on our GPS system. We really thought we were big time that day. The only problem was that we marked about 9 other spots on our GPS that day too and they were all named spot #1, spot #2, spot #3.......You get the idea. The long and short of it was, we should have named the spots and we didn't and it took us about an hour to locate the reef, AGAIN.

Rare, I know, but Andrea was starting to get a little bit cranky. I was certain that the reef was at spot #10 and we kept going and going until we reached spot #10. One problem, spot #10 was located in water that was about 2 feet deep. Now I'm no rocket scientist but I do know that reefs are supposed to be a deep water thing. I wonder what the hell we marked that spot for. Who knows, but we should have named it, "don't dive in head first here!!"

Anyway, after about an hour or so we located the reef. The next issue was how to stay on it because the wind was blowing so hard. We threw out the anchor and I tried to calculate how fast the wind was blowing and from what direction, I then divided that by the number of nautical miles that I thought we had traveled before the anchor caught ground. I came up with absolutely nothing scientific so we just started casting in different directions until we got a bite. LOL.

Andrea caught the first fish!! A beautiful Sheepshead. We love to catch those. it was a big one too. Unfortunately we didn't get a picture because some unprepared boob forgot to change the batteries in the camera. The names were changed here to protect the innocent. Oh fine!!! It was me again!

I caught three Puffer Fish throughout the day. I just love to catch those (NOT), they make me feel like I'm 5 again. On the upside though, I did catch a Black Sea Bass and a Key West Grunt!!! It's funny how we always end up with pictures of the unprepared boob. Oh well, what can I say. Obviously Andrea doesn't hang around for my organizational skills. ;)

It really was an awesome day though. It's days like these that make all the hard work of owning a boat seem worth while!! Fishing Chicks we are.

Peace, Love, and Puffer Fish!!