Sometimes, as Bret would say, you just need to grab a rod.

Today, Jim, Elena, Sheri, and I went fishing for sub-adult lemon sharks around the flats off the east side of North Bimini.  As good as that sounds, it sounds even better when you hear the other groups will be hauling a huge net all day to catch and measure bajillions of tiny silverside fish.  Because of their size and range, larger sharks can't easily be caught with a gillnet and so catching them with a traditional rod and reel can be a good option, plus it's fun as hell.  What's better still, is that before we could shark fish we had to go trolling for barracuda to use as bait.

I caught a barracuda literally as we trolled out of our channel, so we decided to jet up to east wells to troll for a bit longer before anchoring and going after sharks.  After Elena and Sheri both quickly added their own barracuda to our bait supply, we went a bit further north and dropped anchor on the edge of the sand flats and geared up.

Elena was the first to go and, almost immediately, hooked into a small 125cm blacktip that she successfully got to the boat in about five minutes.  The shark was released after a quick work-up (measurements, DNA sample, sexed) and Sheri got ready next.  Landing a second shark proved much more troublesome, with two sharks managing to spit the hook and two others snapping the line, but Sheri eventually landed another blacktip of about equal size.

I was last and, trying not to sound like a douche, hooked into the largest shark of the day.  I spent the next fifteen minutes battling that bastard as he insisted on making lap after lap around the boat, repeatedly forcing me to pass the rod under the anchor line.  After thoroughly tiring himself out, we got the shark (another blacktip, 156cm) secured to the boat and did the work-up.

Now, because the water was relatively shallow and we were over sand, we could see any sharks that were within a hundred feet of the boat.  As a result, a bit of that "fun" fishing feeling of waiting unknowingly for the action was somewhat replaced with an equally exciting and frustrating feeling of watching the shark dance around the bait without biting.  Actually, the previous description works pretty well for my concluding comment; I've finally realized that, unlike the talented troubadour I imagined, I will always tell long and frustratingly detailed stories.  To my high school friends, I was always suspicious that you just liked to give me a hard time.  This was hampered a bit after my college friends managed to come to the same conclusion independently and pretty damn fast.  Now everyone here at the sharklab, arguably the third large new group of friends i've made, has figured it out too.  Well shit.  This has lead me to the conclusion that, not only are my stories long, but they're only getting longer and more unnecessarily and arbitrarily detailed.

Having said that, anyone who does not enjoy my stories speak now......................didn't think so.