With much anticipation, I got a crew together to fish the two day Atlanta Saltwater Sportsman Club's two day Pensacola tournament.  Tim, Snapper Slapper, & I were eager to hit some deep spots for grouper, snapper, and then do a rig run for some tuna & possibly some swordfish drifts.  

Well, once again, the monkey through a wrench in our plans, but we did manage to fish.  The weather man didn't really give us much hope as there were fronts moving through, and heavy sea's forecast well in advance. However, it looked like with a change in between fronts, at the least the sea's would temper at 3-4's.  WRONG....try average sea's of 5-7's with no less than 5.2' recorded on buoy data!!! 

Oh well, we had a tournament to fish, so sea's or no sea's we were going, maybe not as fast as we'd like, but we were going nonetheless.  Oh, and the other bad news, no chart plotter.  Seems the co-capt forgot to get the upgraded C-Map card in time for the trip and had the old card in his drawer, not the slot in the monitor.  So we travelled in rain & fog, from OB over to Pensacola and over to Island Cove Marina using my handheld GPS as a plotter.  The fun never ends!

Day One - Blind rain greeted us when we hit the bay.  Scrambed to put up curtains and creeped out to the pass (once again using the handheld to navigate since we couldn't see thru the thunderstorm heavy rains & curtains.  At the pass, the rain lets up, but the sea's are steep.  Holy cow, waves over the bow, and other boats are turning back. 

We push on determined to fish.  As a plan C, we decide to fish some close public #'s off the beach hoping that the sea's will lie down as the day progresses.  No such luck.  We stick it out, Richard does a great job of keeping us on bottom, plenty of bites, but as you'd expect on close in, public #'s, all small fish.  We end the day with two legal snapper.  Points on the board!  And, we find out that we aren't worse off than our competitors as they either didn't fish or stuck to the bay.  But in this tourney, bay fish count as much as snapper, so no

Day Two - No rain today, but we needed the curtains for the bow spray as the sea's were still tough.  We creeped out at 13-14 knots, for some spots out of the public #'s. Richard found us some more snapper, trigger, short grouper, beeliner's, porgies, you name it.  Since the club rewards points for species, we had a good mixed bag of legal fish, although none particularly large.  We kept trying to keep a kingfish rig in the water, but with the sea's and drift it was difficult.  We were rewarded though we some large fish.  The first came off at the boat, probably a 15-20 lb. king.  We boated the next one, right at 15 lbs, a good tournament scoring fish for us.  We headed on to the Oriskany, but divers were there.  We motored over to the Tenneco, but just couldn't find a fish.  We were hoping for some AJ's to add to our points, but they didn't cooperate.  Another tournament boat advised us there was no bite at the Nipple, so we decided to head in and use whatever time was left to troll the bouy line at the pass for some spanish and maybe another king.  We added a Spanish we hooked on a Stretch 30 (lure was about as big as the fish), but that was it. Lines in, head to weigh in.

We had a good tally, over 150 points when our goal was to reach a 100 for the day.  We were feeling confident, until the Team Outlaw showed up with a bucket of bay fish that closed the gap fast, but not enough to win.  Team $EA $ICKNE$$  took the tournament!  Thanks to Tim & Richard.  We won through some hard fishing & Richard's skills keep the boat over spots in tough sea's.  Congrats guys!