Prepping for the Tournament

Since our return from the Keys, the days we were able to fish were in preparation for the Stuart Sailfish Club's Lady Angler Tournament.   And we were hoping to make up for the lack of fish we caught while in the Keys.

The first day out offered relatively calm seas.  We went through our regular routine of getting things set up, worked out our strategy and crossed our fingers we'd be catching fish soon.  Shortly after we started our trolling, we hit a milestone - 1000 hours on the engines!  Congratulations, Nauti Nole!

The one bit of excitement was a sailfish free jumped, practically across the bow of the boat.  But it happened so fast I wasn't able to capture a picture.  Try as we might, we just could not get his attention or entice him with a bait. Much to our dismay, we got nothing that day!  No bites, no knock-downs, no nothing!

The next day was again nice and calm.  We thought we'd head back to the area where we saw the sailfish and use that as a starting point. 

Roosevelt Bridge in Stuart.

Big ol' ship!

Again no bites, no nibbles, nada!  We did however see about three dozen turtles of all different types. 

Kind of frustrating because everything looked really good (we thought)!   Oh well.  At least the water was calm and there was a little bit of a breeze.

As we headed back in, guess what we ran into....(not literally of course):

Fortunately, we only had to wait about 20 minutes for the train to pass and the bridge to go up.

So we decided our attitude would be "third day's the charm" - which meant we would have good luck the day of the tournament!