My friend Bruno Under­wood called March 18th to ask if we were up to fish—his only oppor­tu­ni­ty to take us out since he’s work­ing round the clock. We have been enjoy­ing fish­ing char­ters with Bruno for five years. On March 19th he and his dad, Baron, met us at Gene’s Bay, north Eleuthera, at 9 and off we went to their favorite spots, plot­ted by GPS. We were in from 12 to 25 feet with 25 lb.-test spin­ning tack­le and cut bait (gog­gle-eyes).

For the first half hour, only nib­bles; Baron said these were yel­low­tail steal­ing our bait, but ”they’ll soon be full and will move on for the big boys.” Sure enough; around 9:45, Emi­ly hooked a huge mut­ton snap­per, and from there they came at us hot and heavy, 14 by the time we quit at 2pm, the biggest haul we have ever seen, most of them over 10 lbs.

Tally-ho

After run­ning out of gog­gle-eyes we switched to lob­ster bait and took two trig­ger­fish, a Queen and an Ocean Tal­ly. We were exhaust­ed fight­ing these mon­sters, which are deter­mined bat­tlers, and try to head for a rock once hooked, where they can break your line—but again, Baron showed us how to relax ten­sion until they swim back out, and we didn’t lose any.

Emi­ly Lang­worth also hooked a nurse shark. It looked about 10 ft long in the water but prob­a­bly wasn’t that big. She worked it to the boat before it broke the line—must have been over 200 pounds. They say these are good eat­ing but it wasn’t wel­come. The Under­woods didn’t want that big brown thing flop­ping around fill­ing the boat.

Wholesale fishing

Back at the dock Bruno and Baron fil­let­ed the catch. I stuffed these huge steaks into plas­tic bags and jammed them in the cool­er with ice. The huge cool­er was so packed Ian Lang­worth had to sit on the lid to make it close. Alto­geth­er there must have been 35 lbs of fil­lets. He fer­ried us back to the main­land at 4:30. We dropped a heavy bag off with Bahami­an friends on the way home. We have since held four enor­mous fish din­ners and giv­en away bags of snap­per. Also, the freez­er is still packed. Who says you can’t catch big fish the old-fash­ioned way?