Pros : The boat was great, plenty of good seating, the twin 225 Yamahas got us to the fishing hole quickly, we had Capt. Steven on this run and he was great to be around. Kept the outlaw country blasting (upon request) was very welcoming and friendly the whole time, seemed very knowledgeable of the seas and fish all the way around. Just an all around great guy for me and the wife to be stuck with for 6 hours.
Cons: There are definitely a lot of positives in this Con section, so this definitely isn’t all bad, but with that said I’ll continue…
We let the owner of the boat, Capt. Payton Anderson, know when we booked the trip we had been fishing in the gulf before, and had a blast wearing out the red snapper on that particular trip. We knew red snapper was out of season this time of year, and requested that while we were still looking for some good eating fish (mahi mahi, grouper, redfish, etc.) that we also wanted to spend some time targeting more sport fish and fighting fish (sailfish, amberjack, Bonitas, etc.). The captain acknowledged our request, and even made a comment when I asked about the lunar phase effecting our trip possibly, that it wouldn’t matter because we were not going after red snapper on this trip. We arrive at the boat, meet Capt. Steven, and ask as we are pulling off what we would be going after today. His response was trigger fish. I again let him know that I would like to spend some time going after harder catches and more sport fish this trip, and we took off. Once we got to where we were going, the poles started bending immediately! We tagged out on trigger fish right away, which was great! Then we caught about another 30 total fish combined over the next 5 or so hours, which is great too! The problem, is we spent basically 5 hours bottom fishing for trigger fish and snapper, which wasn’t exactly what we were looking to do. We did catch two white snapper, and mingo as well, which was great, but since red snapper wasn’t in season, this wasn’t much of a haul back to the dock, and basically was a catch and release trip for red snapper and trigger fish. The last 30 or so minutes the Capt. Did take us to do some amberjack fishing, which is exactly what we wanted, but to no avail. All in all, if red snapper was still in season, we would of had a HECK of a haul, and wouldn’t have had a single negative thing to say about the trip. The man kept us on the fish the whole trip for sure, just wish we had spent a couple of those hours fishing for the types of fish we were after.
All in all, I do highly recommend southern country charters and Capt. Steven, but with that said, I also highly recommend going during red snapper season…
Pros : The boat was great, plenty of good seating, the twin 225 Yamahas got us to the fishing hole quickly, we had Capt. Steven...