Slowly But Surely...

I got up on April 6th at 9:00 ready to go fishing and meet up with Chad at Big Carlos Pass around noon. He had to go to teach until 11:30.
When I got up, I ate a quick breakfast and submitted some of my assignments for school and got ready to go. My fishing tackle was already in the car, as always, so at 10:00, I left for the beach. I am always torn whether I should take highway 41 to Bonita Beach road or if I should travel to Big Carlos via Summerlin Road. Unfortunately, I decided to take Summerlin. This was a huge mistake. I finally got to the pass at 11:15. It took me one hour and 15 minutes to travel 10 miles.(Theres nothing worse than a snowbird on a two lane road!)
I unloaded all of my tackle and went onto the bridge. It was fairly crowded, but I headed to mine and Chad's lucky spot on the bridge. I threw out my never-fail gotcha plug and I had no hits. Then I changed to a chartreuse-blood red jig with no success. About 45 minutes later, I changed back to my plug hoping the tides had shifted the schools of baitfish and brought the mackeral closer to the shelter of the bridge. This thought sounds better on paper than what actually happened. I collected my stuff and began walking to the car to call Chad.
I got a hold of him; "Are you on your way yet?" "No, I'm eating lunch and I will be there in about 40 minutes" he said. "Nobody is catching anything, you may not want to waste your gas." He was emphatic about coming out anyway which gave me confidence that maybe we would have luck later on in the day. "I'll meet you at New Pass," he said. "We'll try the fishing there."
We got to New Pass, which is the bridge 2 miles east of San Carlos Pass. We chased some fiddler crabs for fun and tried to catch non-existent green backs. We spent about 30 minutes at New Pass, then Chad suggested we go back to Big Carlos. I am happy he talked me into going back with him. I had lost all faith in catching anything on this day.
We arrived to San Carlos Pass around 12:30. Nobody was at the bridge. Everyone that we talked to was giving up. Chad and I were pretty confident after the first few cast that the mackeral were still schooling.
Chad was using his sabiki rig and he had something. We could tell by his fishing rod action that it was not a mackeral; there was no fight. It was some sort of spiky box fish neither of us had ever seen. I thought it might be a puffer, but the fish wasn't puffing up and it was making very gutteral hissing sounds. It was pretty scary. Luckily it shook itself off the hook. (This fish is the spiky black and yellow fish pictured above.)
As the afternoon progressed, we started to catch on to the mackeral and I caught my biggest yet.(We had to walk it to the beach so it wouldn't break my rod, and Chad went an dehooked it.) It was probably 25 inches at the fork of the tail and weighed close to 7 pounds. (That was our estimation)-(The fork of the tail is the closest part of the tail to the body.)
Chad did well catching the mackeral also. I didn't get many pictures of him this trip, but he kept saying we would get a picture of the next one, and of course, we never did.
I left around 3 because I had to go home and get ready for work at 5:30. Chad stayed, but I have not talked to him in the last 24 hours to find if he had any luck after I left.
I think we are going to go to Marco Island this Friday, both of us are free, and I think Aren is going to come with us. I think we are going to go for mangrove snapper, mackeral, some snook(which we can't keep until later in the year), and whatever else bites our bait. There will definitely be a post for this trip, I just hope we catch a bunch of good stuff.