Ahoy, Hoy!

Dave and I went out on a little sea fishing trip today.  We went to Dockside Fishing in Virginia Beach and went to sea on the Bay Princess.  Here's Dave in dock, looking oh-so European:

I'm on a boat.

There was lots of fishing, lots of catching, but very little keeping.  We used squid as bait (yup...I baited my own hook) and caught mostly croakers, and one toad fish.  The croakers are aptly named: they make this terrible noise when they're out of the water.  The toad fish look like toads and have enormous jaws and try to bite (we let the guides take them off the hook and throw them back....they're big, but inedible).

 

Between the two of us, we probably caught 30 fish, but we wound up only keeping three (okay...I didn't take my fish off the hook when it was time to throw them back...one sharp spiny fin prick, and I was ready to let the fishing guides and Dave deal with the throw-back fish).  For some reason unbeknownst to us, we didn't think it was important to take any photos of our fish before we had them filleted at the dock.  Three fish wasn't nearly enough for dinner, so we supplemented by purchasing two more Croakers at $2.55 a lb. at the Dockside Seafood market.  In hindsight, maybe the market and not the boat is the more economical way to go in the future.

The big excitement of the day was when our neighbor fishing buddies caught a sandbar shark.  I actually thought they were going to be able to keep it, but it turns out they have to be 54 inches long to be legal.  So no Shark Fin soup for anyone on our boat.

 

Check out that pearly smile!  This is actually our boat guide (not the fellow tourist angler) holding the shark.  He warned us all to keep our distance.

 And just to prove I was there, here I'm am with the VA beach shoreline in the background.  I couldn't tell yet, but despite liberal applications of SPF 50 sunscreen, I came home looking like a lobster.  We might try the legendary Striped Bass fishing after Thanksgiving, but for now I'm happy to remain on dry land.