The next article from Matt “Flint River Correspondent” Walker, detailing a recent deep sea fishing trip. I actually took one of these trips with Jacqulyn and Gina once. Jacqulyn’s working on a story for the site about that little jaunt down nausea lane (those two were SO sick…). In their defense, the sea were indeed very rough that day, so rough that I had to fish from a kneeling position. Matt’s trip was much more fun from the sound of things. Hope everyone is having a great 4th!

hawgdaddy

An Orange Beach, AL sunrise

A couple weeks back, my boss walked over and asked me what I knew about deep sea fishing and charter boats out of Orange Beach. As it turns out, I spent much of my youth on a boat running back and forth to rigs and artificial reefs searching for ‘sows’ (our pet name for huge snapper), and knew one boat captain very well. Allen Kruse was a great friend of my Dad’s when I was growing up, and worked with him side-by-side at United Parcel Service. One day, Allen came in from a long day of driving and delivering and told them all, “Hang it, I’m going fishing.” He resigned, borrowed the cash to buy a boat, and started chartering for a living.

Allen now owns two boats – the Rookie and the Rookie II – and is well known in Orange Beach as one of the best. Paul, my boss, contacted him and set up a charter for this past weekend on the Rookie II.

We showed up bright and early Saturday morning at Zeke’s Landing to meet the captain and deckhand hard at work readying the boat for our departure. The Rookie II is captained by Jason, who has over 18 years of experience fishing the waters off the Alabama coast. Our deckhand, Jerry – called ‘Willis’ by his friends, and lucky customers who get to know him – was a mechanical engineer and plumber from Fort Lauderdale who had moved to Mobile to start a new business. I almost finished asking him why he was fishing for a living when I thought about what I was saying – he gets to FISH for a living… I was a little concerned before taking out, as I was unfamiliar with the captain and deckhand, but I trusted that Allen knew what he was doing and had placed us in good hands.

Man, I LOVE being right…

A nice red snapper.

We left the dock at precisely 6:15 AM with Paul, his dad (Ted), my dad (Ronnie), my brother (David) and my cousin (Stuart – picture a loud, drunk, crude version of Larry the Cable Guy), swinging right to head out for open water. As any good deep sea charter will do, we stopped to get some fresh, live bait along the way.

Alewife (locally known as L-Y’s) school by the thousands along the current breaks inshore in relatively shallow water and can easily be caught using something called a sabiki rig. The sabiki rig is a 12-14 inch rig with 8-10 small, gold hooks hanging off it. Each hook has a small feathery appendage that apparently looks like food to the L Y’s (and a variety of other baitfish). You’re supposed to cast the groovy little strings of lures into the current break and jig them up and down until you get fish on. Properly done, jigging a sabiki through a school should bring up 5-10 fish per cast. Since most of the party were members of my immediate family, we, of course, were only bringing in one to two fish per cast.

The captain, anxious to get us out to REAL fishing, climbed down and pulled out a baitcast net. He made a near-perfect toss and handed it to the deckhand to pull in. Now, I’ve seen captains and deckhands do this a hundred times and usually a good cast will get you anywhere from 20-50 fish. I knew something was different about this one when Willis grunted loudly and muttered, “I’m gonna need a little help with this one, boys.”

He attempted to pull it in himself. Didn’t work.

He and my cousin (pretty large fella) tried to pull it in. Didn’t work.

Finally, all of us got a hold of it and yanked it in. I’d say the captain must have hit the motherload. Willis pulled the release on the net and we had, quite literally, about 500 L Y’s flood the back of the boat. Guys standing on the other deep sea boats around us were all dying – gales of laughter wafting across the Gulf as all of us kept falling over trying to find solid footing on the deck. After about an hour or so, while the captain was getting us out to blue water, we cleared ‘em off..

Along the way, Willis filled us in on their technique for the day and what we were and weren’t supposed to do on the trip. Only my boss and his dad were relatively new to deep sea fishing, but I was impressed that Willis took the time to educate customers on the trip out. As many times as I’ve been out on charters, this was the first where the deckhand taught simple, meaningful lessons on the way out.

One of the things we talked about was the relatively new ruling by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), restricting the snapper creel to two per person – excluding the captain and deckhand. Meaning on our party, we’d get to bring home a maximum of 12 fish (snapper). We quickly learned that this has changed the methods a lot of captains use now for charter trips. Since the limit is only two, captains stretch the trips further and further and use more techniques to find large sows. As Jason put it, “People come to Orange Beach from all over the nation to catch red snapper, because Alabama has THE BEST fishing anywhere. It’s not even a close comparison with anyone else. But who wants to travel all the way from New York to catch two fish?” Willis promised us that the Rookie II only went after BIG snapper. “If you come all this way to catch two fish, we want them to be good fish.”

Once we got to the first drop, Willis hooked everyone up with a cigar minnow and they all dropped to a 7 count. I waited until last, and Willis rewarded me with a live L Y to start out with. I threw the release back, dropped my bait until the count of seven, then cocked the handle back. Within a matter of seconds, the rod bent over and I was off to the races. After a solid 5 minute battle, the fish got off. It would have easily been the largest fish of my day and I never even saw it (as an aside, that’s one of the things I like so much about deep sea fishing – you never know what you’re going to catch).

I had told Willis I wanted my boss to catch an amberjack, and he set him up with an LY after his first fish, educating him on how to catch a big one. About 20 minutes later, Paul had boated a nice A J, which we threw in the icebox to join the myriad snapper we’d pulled up.

At this same drop, a pod of porpoise came over to play alongside the boat. Jason and Willis exclaimed in disgust and told us we might as well reel up. When I asked why, Jason explained that the porpoise in the Gulf are very accustomed to seeing deep sea boats fishing, and love to come play with, and eat, the catch. As a protected specie, boaters are not allowed to intentionally harm or interfere with porpoise or dolphin, and there’s nothing you can do about it but pull up and drive to a new location, hoping they don’t follow you. I told Willis this has got to be frustrating in their line of work, not being able to even shoo the pests away. He told me recently it’s gotten so bad a captain on a boat from Panama City whipped out a gun and started blasting the dolphin to keep them off his boat. While I think my cousin might have actually enjoyed a shootout with flipper on the high seas, I was glad our captain simply pulled up and headed off to another spot.

At the next drop, Willis decided to try something different and rigged up a spincast rod for a drift line. After placing a hook just before the LY’s eye and leaving a trailer hook behind him, he tossed it out and pulled a little slack in the line before placing the rod in the holder. Usually on a drift line you wait patiently for the bait to meander over the reef, hoping for a big one to come up for a nibble. On this trip, of course, things were a little different.

I’d say it took approximately 3.7 pico seconds for something to hit the bait and attempt to pull the rod from its holder. Willis had just turned his back to the rod, heading over to set up yet another drifter. My brother, the gleam of FISH ON in his eyes, grabbed the rod and set off into a 15 minute battle with a fantastic king mackerel. This scene repeated itself several times over, and we all had a blast reeling in – and sometimes losing – some true monsters.

After catching our limit on snapper, pulling in some other nice fish (scamp, black snapper, AJ’s, kings and grouper), and listening to the barrage of humorous, and sometimes crude, alcohol laden stories and epithets from my cousin we headed in late in the afternoon. On the ride back, I knew it had been a good trip – nobody puked and everyone was going to go home with fish.

When we arrived back at the dock, we loaded our fish up, got a couple of pictures, and headed over to the cleaning station where Willis set about cleaning our fish for us. While we were waiting, my eye caught two young ladies measuring, weighing and seemingly performing surgery on mackerel from everyone’s catch. I walked over and asked what they were doing.

The ladies were students from the University of West Florida, and were gathering data on the fish. Apparently there’s something known as an ear stone on mackerel which has rings on it, much like a tree. The rings can be used to determine the fish’s age, among other things, and the stones were being collected for analysis at some other time and location in support of the girl’s thesis: the benefits of recreational fishing on populations in the Gulf.

In talking to the ladies, I found another interesting piece of information: when the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) does their annual count of Red Snapper in the Gulf, they do not count any fish on artificial reefs nor from oil rigs. This, of course, reduces their overall count numbers by about 60%. Why is this such a big deal? Because Jason and Willis are right : people simply won’t come that far just to catch two fish, no matter how big they are, and the NMFS is basing their rulings on inaccurate numbers to suit some political agenda.

The charter fishing industry in Orange Beach is second to none, built primarily on the (true) assertion that Alabama’s Gulf Coast is the red snapper capital of the world. Over the past couple of decades, Alabama and several local charter fisherman and groups, has made a concerted effort to build and maintain artificial reefs for the intended purpose of benefiting fish populations and the fishing industry. The fact NMFS doesn’t count any of this effort is a crime, and punishes the wrong people. One of the ladies performing the study told me that over 70% of the red snapper killed in the gulf come from shrimp boats. How restricting a deep sea crew to 2 fish per person will fix THAT problem, I guess I’ll never know.

So what does this mean to the weekend angler looking for deep sea action? It means you need to do your homework! You need a boat with an experienced captain and deckhand, with a proven record of bringing in a good catch. Anyone committing that much time and money into a fishing excursion without doing their homework must be in line, eventually, for a Darwin award…

For my part, I cannot recommend Jason, Willis, or Allen enough. They’ve all forgotten more about fishing than most of us will ever know. If you’re looking for a TRUE Orange Beach deep sea experience, give them a shout:

Captain Allen Kruse
Rookie CHarters
rookiecharters@gulftel.com
251-952-2141

Rookie II (Captain Jason)
251-979-9181

Matt

Tags: alewife, Orange Beach, red snapper, saltwater fishing, University of West Florida

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Other Fishing, Trip Reports. The author is Nathan Kennedy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.