The LLGF Ft.Lauderdale Chapter planned an outing to Chokoloskee Island this weekend. 16 girls showed up to fish and it was a total blast. We stayed in the trailers at Chokoloskee Island Park and chartered five boats for Saturday. [B]Capts. Herb Kehoe, Gary Thompson, Don Cochran, Becky Campbell and Ray Culver. [/B]
I was on Capt. Herb's boat with my friends Capt. Lee and Capt. Lanny. We started out the day catching bait and Lee even took a try on the castnet.
Then since the tide was so low, we decided to fish out front for the morning. My first cast of the day landed a 16 pound jack - that's one way to wake up....
After that, Lee caught a nice cobia and a redfish. We had the usual song and dance with the sharks and felt happy to get the cobia in the boat in one piece.
Things slowed down during slack tide and we had a few more jacks and some sharks,nothing exciting. Crabs were at a premium and we only had a few but on the incoming, we decided to chase the permit for awhile. 2 permit later, we were pretty happy. I thought sight casting to the pods was particularly awesome.
Next up, we only had about an hour left and no more bait (long story) so we decided to go throw some Berkley Gulps at the trout. That turned out to be a lot of fun and we had multiple trout in the 16-22 inch range. I personally don't like to eat trout, but Lanny wanted 'em, so she kept a couple.
We made the run back to the ramp, completely satisfied that we'd had a stellar day. We met up with the other girls and they all had equally awesome reports - I'm pretty sure every single person had a blast.
We had dinner and sat around the chiki hut telling fish stories till about 1 am.
On Sunday, we decided to "descend" upon the unsuspecting folks at City Seafood for some stone crabs. The kitchen clearly wasn't prepared for the onslaught of all us women combined with a couple of packs of motorcycles...They were pretty overwhelmed. My friend Amy, despite the fact that she's actually an attorney, decided to jump in and help out on the line and it was clear to us that this was not her first deep fryer rodeo! Amy stayed in the kitchen for about an hour and the rest of us drank beer and ate crabs. It was awesome.
So, now that the population of women on Choko has decreased by 50%, we are all back home and happy to have had such a fun weekend out there. All of the guides were awesome and treated the girls like gold. It was great.
~Jenn
LLGF Staff
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