Big Mouthed Hammer... First beast of the year...LONG POST

We were all set on going to the keys until we were informed of a cold front moving in. With that in mind Hammer made some calculations and swayed us northbound.

Jimmy Dean picked up his kids then me and we went to Hammer's house. From there I got to fish right on the spot.

Arrived at a bridge and nobody was catching anything, so I scanned long and hard and figured out where the action was at. Before long I had me and the crew catching all kinds of fish.

I got a ladyfish out of this fight.

Here's a blue from later.

It was freezing out that night so I walked out to the end with my sleeping bag and awaited a tide switch. Jonathan was too anxious to wait for me to put a bait out so shortly after the switch he had a bait on my rod straight up and down. I slept through the first hit so Jonathan got up so fast his sleeping bag flew in the water. He set the hook and got the best runs out of it. I got up and saw the line was towards a buoy so we maneuvered around posts and made short work out of the 6ft bull.

That's the most bend I can get out of that rod...

Gotcha.

We got to another spot and it was pretty slow, spent hours on end without being able to catch bait or anything. Then we hooked something.

The reel started coming off the rod, what kind of beast did we have

After the wobbly reel fight we found out it was just a nurse.

Back at the jetty my rod was running... so I ran, grabbed the rod and did the running man... I was officially out of breathe.

Jonathan is tall so he gets pipe duty.

Another strange fight... I wonder why.

Jonathan insisted on National Geographic style pics.

Now we've officially cleared all the nurse sharks from the area.

And now is where everything began to change. We noticed some mullet saying near shore so we rigged up the penn 706 with a wire rig and a hook and prepared to get some mullet. We turn around and inside the inlet a big school of mullet was getting bashed. Hammer threw a tube lure and snagged a mullet, this mullet started burning him. It was five pounds!!! Hammer fished the mullet on the rod for a bit and then he reeled it in and told me to use it. It was so big I had to open the bail and throw it like a football. It swam 200 yards parallel to the beach then veered to the ocean and was 300 yards out from the tip of the jetty into the blue.

After a while my mullet acted funny so I reeled a little to check it and something knocked it into the sky, about when it came back down something jumped up and grabbed it. I struggled to get the line off of the roller bail to give it time to run before I set the hook. It ran so fast I had to set up by cupping the spool.

Thirty minutes of reel burning and running to avoid rocks later I had a beast in sight. I saw vibrant purple and black stripes on the tail and I yelled: It's a ****ing wahoo!

But we pulled up this instead.

4ft 6inches, 34lbs! My biggest cuda in 4 or 5 years.

We came back from weighing it and getting food.

The wind had switched and JimmyLevelWind guaranteed us a beast when we put out that bait.

17lbs of bait in the kayak.

Before Hammer could yak back in the shark grabbed it.

Hammer ran up on shore, grabbed the rod and did the running man. I said: Aren't you gonna let it run?

After it was hooked she ran for 10-20 minutes straight.

All we could do was walk as far as we could from the jetty.

Two hours later we figured out what ate 17lbs of bait in one bite.

It was the big mouthed hammer!

And she was fat.

Got her back in two-three minutes.

Even with the quick release she took a little more effort.

She came back in for a third time Maybe to say bye.

Then we got our high-fin salute She was 10ft 8inches

So to sum it all up. It was teamwork that caught the mullet, that caught the cuda, and that caught the hammer.

The McDonald's Story... we sat down to have breakfast between the golden arches and some @$$HOLE was trying to steal our rods But it was the famous Picua, at a work meeting