Another bucket list item: fishing off a pier or a head boat and actually catching something saltwater. The last time in St. Augustine, I fished off the pier on Anastasia Island. Why five hundred college kids thought it was a good idea to whoop, holler, and bob around under the pier while a bunch of us were fishing was beyond me. I was hoping I’d have hooked one right in the ass. Then we rented a cottage in Crooked River State Park in GA, right beside King’s Bay Naval Base, where they keep the nuke subs. There was a public floating dock right beside the park, and we set up camp on it. The tide started coming in, and the drum and sheepshead were following crabs and bait fish right up under the dock around sundown. You should have heard the ruckus they were making when they were feeding off the crabs on the floats. I thought, great, here we go. Then some guy backed his truck up to the ramp, put his boat in the water, and sat there revving his engine for ten minutes and killed the inlet completely. If I’d have been armed, I’d have ventilated his hull. The one thing we did take away was, while we were sitting in the car, we looked out and saw a pod of wild dolphins swimming down the East River, toward the ocean. I’ve seen them at the National Aquarium at Inner Harbor, even got soaked by one during the dolphin show, but there’s something different about catching a glimpse of them wild, in their own environment like that. Especially framed by the sun just dipping below the horizon behind them.
Sounds like fun.