A Weekend of Firsts

Cameron's good friend from college, Court, came down to Texas for a last big hoorah before he begins his MBA program at Cornell. Cameron decided deep sea fishing would be a great experience for all of us. None of us had ever been before. Part of the requirement for deep sea fishing is an early morning start. To make that possible, Nathan spent the night at his grandparent's house, my FIRST night away from him. I dropped him off on Thursday morning and didn't see him again until Friday evening. I didn't get any bad reports so I think the night out went well.

Our fishing experience was not very action packed. We headed out on the water around 7:30AM. Court caught the first fish of the day around 8:30, a fairly small bonnet-heads shark. Not until 12:30 did we get another fish when the deck hand gaffed a ling from the side of the boat. I am not exactly sure how he ever pulled that off, but once he did he was on a super high. About 20 minutes later he hooked a second ling and gave me the fishing pole. I worked on getting that fish in the boat for about 30 minutes (from what I am told). I think I brought the fish to within a couple feet of the boat about 4 times before he would quickly dive down underneath the boat. I did not like the sound the reel made when he would take off. It was a bit exhausting reeling and pulling and it tore up my thumb and middle finger. Apparently I should have been wearing gloves if I was pulling in that kind of fish. My fingers are still hurting and will probably take a bit longer to heal up. We finally got the fish in the boat in what felt like hours later. I was done with fishing for the day and moved onto taking photos. We caught one more little shark before the day was done. Not too much action (enough for me) but we did bring home lots of fish. The ling that I caught was estimated at 65 lbs. You can tell it was extremely large. Fortunately it tastes very nice.


After that adventure I competed in my second triathlon of the season on Sunday. I placed 4th out of 34 girls in my age group. Most of our weekends are not that busy.