Offshore

As I've said earlier, I am very happy with the offshore fishing trip. I've never been out of sight of land, and this was a good time to do another thing that I've never done. In Louisisna you have an opportunity to spend a lot of time on the water, but there are lots of waters in Louisiana. Up north, you have freshwater lakes, swamps, marshes, sloughs, rivers and streams. Down south, you have brackish marshes, lakes, rivers, sloughs and swamps along with the freshwater variety of each. If there is one thing Louisiana has plenty of, it is water.

I'm fairly proficient on small boats, freshwater fishing and recreational boats. I can paddle a canoe and row a rowboat. I've owned pirogues and jon boats, but I had never been out of sight of land, and I am ignorant of things from the sea.

It's going to take a while to understand everything I have learned during that one brief foray offshore, but dammit, I want to go back and learn more. There is a whole lot of Louisiana that I know very little about.

Still, time for pictures



My lady caught one of the very first fish on the boat. Here she poses with it. A red snapper, caught over sunken oilfield wreckage in about 70 feet of water. The oilfield is everywhere you look in Louisiana Gulf waters. There is a tremendous amount of metal in an oil rig, most of it environmentally benign. Those parts that are unusable are scrapped, sunken, marked and used as structure for the fisheries. Lots of fish come from Louisiana waters. The stuffed redfish you find at your finer restaurants probably come from Louisiana, as that species are caught both commercially and recreationally. They are mighty fine eating and our catch was primarily red snapper



This photo is my daughter with her lemonfish, the only one caught on this trip. It's a darned large fish. In the photo, the tail was on the deck. The fish itself probably weighed 40 pounds. Daughter was quite proud. The fellow holding the fish is a deckhand, Adam, who took care of the ladies with grand wit and humor. The deckhands made this trip pleasant.

Looking at those pictures, I am amazed that I managed to not get an oil rig in either one of the photos. Oil field equipment was everywhere. Yet the water was blue and the fishing was great.