Our plan was to escape and fish for a day while on vacationing w/the family in Panama City, FL. We'd head towards the Ozark and fish some bottom spots on the way. We hoped to find some blue h20 and perhaps some weeds.  

Well we found the weeds w/in 10 miles of the pass.  We picked up a few peanuts and a fair king to get the skunk off us, and then moved on out for deeper water.  We decided to make some drops at some 150-170' spots, but we couldn't find a bite.  We had plenty of pinfish, so we just kept moving about hoping our luck would change as the day progressed. 

Well the day progressed, but the bottom bite didn't.  We kept marking good bottom with same result.  We slowly worked our way further out continuiing to look for some feature to troll.  We trolled between spots looking to stumble across a hoo, but again, nothing.  For the heck of it, we continued on out to the Ozark and even did a few drops there at over 300', but again, no change in our luck.

We decided to cover some ground, run to the mingo ridge areas w/the idea of trolling from there towards the nipple.  As we were changing over rigs and double checking our numbers, we noticed some weeds off in the distance.  We headed over and despite a slightly cooler water temp, we found a loosely organized weed line with a few large patches interspersed. 

We worked the weedline for several miles, constantly tending the lines checking & clearing them of weeds. We trolled a couple ballyhoo on blue & white islanders, a yozuri bonito, and a small chugger behind a bird, & large chugger mid-way hoping for some blue action.  About a 1/2 hour into troll, a large dolphin slammed one of the ballyhoo. 

It was exciting to see the fish smash the bait and almost leap from one wake to other in one jump.  This fish must have had a billfish as a step parent as he put on a heck of a show jumping and thrashing on the surface.  We could easily see we had a 20 lb. class fish.  We kept motoring forward and let the fish take some drag in order to buy enough time to clear a few lines before attempting to bring the fish to the boat. Even at a distance, the color of the fish was outstanding.  The boga scale confirmed the fish at 22 lbs. which was a bit surprising to us given the overall length and heft of the fish. No matter, we had a new HOF fish, high fives all around.

We continued to troll, clear weeds off the lines, repeat, until the clock said it was time to head in.  We stopped off at some numbers for the grouper hole & Grey Ghost.  We found a few red grouper & snapper.  Finally at least we had 1/2 a bite going on bottom.  We threw a few odd fish in the box to round out the trip, then called it a day knowing dinner wouldn't be waiting at the house if we were late.