My Fishing Adventures
by Christopher Sprague, Jr. Angler-Team Tuppens
I hope you all have been fishing a lot lately. We fished the Fort Lauderdale Meat Mayhem recently. We headed out toward Juno/Jupiter in the early morning. We caught one small kingfish there but heard reports of bigger fish further North. While we headed that way, we saw a frigate bird and a school of flying fish getting eaten. Sadly, we couldn’t get any fish there, so we continued our journey North. It took us awhile because it was around 3-5 foot waves, but we eventually got there. We set our lines out and within 5 minutes we had our first bite. We reeled it in quickly and it was a kingfish; only around 12 pounds, it was weighable, so we were happy. We set the lines back out, and within a few minutes, we heard the reel scream. We reeled it as fast as we could as there were a lot of sharks around. We gaffed it and when we saw how big it was, we were ecstatic, we thought we had a winner! We estimated this fish to be around 45 pounds. We kept fishing and we caught a few more fish around 12 pounds before we left to weigh in. We had 53 miles to the weigh in and thought with a nice fish we should leave early. We were the 2nd boat to weigh in and the other boat had a good fish around 50 pounds also. We got in line, and their fish was 47.5 pounds, we knew it was going to be close. We weighed our small fish first, all around 12 pounds. Finally, the moment of truth, they put the fish on, it jumped to 50 pounds and slowly went down to 46.5 pounds. All we could hope for was 2nd or 3rd. We ended up getting 4th but got a lot of points for Southern Kingfish Association SKA. I got 2nd place in the Jr category!