I went fishing

On Sunday I woke up at 3 in the morning to go striper fishing with my cousin who is 24, my uncle and a bunch of his friends. My cousin picked me up at 3:30, then we went and picked everyone up and started driving down to Cape May. We stopped to pick up bait at about 4:15. The bait were bunkers, which were about 14 inches long. On the boat we cut them into pieces to use.

We got onto the boat at about 6 and left at 6:15. We got to our fishing spot at about 8:15. We started catching fish right away. I was the second person to get something; I caught a dog shark about 27 or 28 inches long. The whole boat only caught 3 stripers which were what we were fishing for, but they were big, 42 inches, 40 inches and 36 inches. I caught another shark about 18 inches later. The weight on my line was 5 ounces, which is alot, so I didn't even know it was hooked.

I didn't get to hold or get a picture taken with the bigger shark because the first mate took out of the hook and threw it back in really quick. He probably did that because we were fishing for striped bass and he thought the sharks were just annoying. The last 90 minutes of fishing no one caught anything because the tides weren't right. So just as they started to switch and were going to start getting hits again, the boat captain started taking us back. Oh well, it was still fun.

My Vaycay

This summer I went to the Florida Keys. We took a plane to Fort Lauderdale; that took about 3 hours. Then we rented a car and drove 4 hours to Key Marathon to my aunt's vacation house that she was giving us for 5 days. It was right on the water of the Gulf of Mexico and itr had a dock that went out about 100 yards into the water. It also had a swimming pool. The ocean was prefectly still with no waves, and crystal clear. It was really warm too, about 85 degrees every day.

At the end of the dock there would always be dozens of big fish swimming around, like 30+ inches. So you could imagine the area is an awesome place to fish. There was alot of barracuda, nurse sharks, tarpon (they can get huge, like 7+ feet) rays, angelfish, king mackeral and other things. It was a missed opprotunity though, because I just started fishing alot after we left and I didn't really know anything about it while we were there. Me and my mom even saw manatees. It was nighttime and we were on the dock and one made a really big splash. There were 4 of them and they were really big. They swam by the dock two times and then left.

We even went snorkeling off the dock and saw all those things. Later we went snorkeling in the open water above a coral reef. It was really cool. There was thousands of fish every color you could imagine. There was big schools of hundreds of fish, and they were pretty good sized. There was alot of scorpion fish; they are weird looking things... they are brown and tan with spines all over their fins. I saw a few really big barracuda as well... One that was 5 and a half feet swam by me; that was pretty scary. Cudas that big have teeth that are that big have teeth that are half an inch and 3 quarters of an inch big. I also saw one under the boat that was about 3 and a half feet.

That was probably the most fun in the trip but we did other stuff too... We took a tour of Key West on one of those train things so that was pretty cool. We went into where Ernest Hemingway the writer used to live as well. Overall is was alot of fun and it's a really beatiful place so I hope I can go back sometime.