Going after some stripers today

Well, we almost didn't go out. Me and three guys I work with went down to the boat and met up with another guy we work with who is a mate on the boat... add the captain and we were the only 6 that showed up to fish. The captain said if we had 5 paying customers we would go out... so the mate, John, paid for the trip so the rest of us could go. We had an 85 footer all to ourselves.

We left around 5 and had our lines in the water by 5:45... that's after 15 minutes of jocking the boat trying to get near a pod of fish that a smaller boat was on... but the smaller boat wasn't fishing, they were trying to get their anchor to hold.[mad] We boated our first fish at around 6. And just kept catchin' em. We probably boated 30 fish between the 6 of us (the mate and captain fished too) and everyone caught a keeper (slot fish, nothing huge). The fishing almost completely shut down when the sun went down and we headed home around 9:30... back at the dock around 10. Since John was the only mate on board, we all chipped in cleaning up and made short work of it. It was a good time... but I'm kinda hung over today.