Three buddies and I left Surfside Marina (Freeport, TX) Saturday morning around 7:30 AM. We loaded up the last of the gear & headed straight out to the shelf... Made live bait on some nearby rigs and felt good about the evening bite to come later that day. Once on the shelf we started trolling and had good signs but the morning action was slow and as the afternoon came we still had not had anything in the spread. We were replacing lures & changing things etc.

We stopped during the heat of the day for lunch and dropped down the deep drop rig and pulled up some Tile for the fish boxes. We snagged a black tail moray eel that hitched a ride up on one drop. After a few more tile came up we moved out to the floaters and began trolling again.

The day wore on as we slow boated out. We hadn't seen much action, lots of bait and good signs but no takers on any of the lures.

We got ready for the evening bite at the floaters and setup jigs, poppers and chunk. The jigs produced blackfin and we started chunking & using poppers as the sunset on into the night. We saw a few popping on the surface but the action was short lived and fairly crowded with a number of boats all working the area. I think there was more light coming from all underwater lights then the rig itself .

Around 2AM Tiny had a good run on a live bait rig but the fish came unbuttoned and just like that the fish was gone. Early in the morning we had a decent blackfin nail a jig which ended up being our largest so we decided to hold onto it in case we couldn't get a YFT to bite.

As the morning came we again setup for troll and pulled into the congo line now circling the floaters. We had immediate action as our shotgun got nailed. We quickly cleared the lines and a Albacore came swimming up. We dropped the spread back in and added an extra lure to the mix that the tuna hit. Our second pass had another hookup, however only a small blackfin that was released at the boat. Our third pass had the reel screaming again and as the fish came into range we saw it was our Wahoo. A quick gaff and she was in the boat and hook came right out as she cleared the sides. We got lucky especially on mono leader. We continued our troll but after 4-5 more passes with no lucky we moved back off the shelf to try and get our Dorado. We didn't see anyone else hooking up that morning so felt good about moving to a new spot.

Trolled our way back inshore with nothing having so we pulled the spread & moved closer in until we found some decent weed lines. We tossed out a few pieces of cut bait and a small dorado came to my line and we had a fish on. Then a slightly larger dorado came and hit the other reel and soon after some dancing and acrobatics we had two mahi in the boat.

We felt really good as we now had all three fish and before leaving port that was our goal. Granted we did not have the YFT like we had hoped but the 100 points is what we were after for our first tournament and we accomplished it. We continued trolling around the rigs & anchored shrimp boats with nothing biting as we bounced our way back in. We pulled the lines out of the water around 2:30 and headed back in.

We got back into Surfside Marina around 4:30 where we weighed our fish, got the boat cleaned up etc. We had 3rd place after we weighed in, which surprised us. Perhaps we had a chance? Well that was short lived we got bumped off the board by those that found the YFT.

I had a great time fishing my first off shore tournament and we are already looking forward for the next one!















Unofficial Results... I took a pic of us on the leader board before we got bumped down. We are not sure where we ended up maybe 4th? Hopefully the full results will be posted soon.

Nice Tile, and solid trip!

I figure about $75 per fish in fuel alone, but you could have caught something big and paid for the whole trip. But the camaraderie alone is worth the money, I am sure. Looks like fun.

Sounds like a hell of a time! Good read.