Last update July 5, 2009

Amateur

Radio

Fresh &Salt Water Fishing

Fishing Report

July 3

On Friday, July 3rd Mark Kellum and I headed out to fish in the 61st Annual Mississippi Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo. I have fished in way over half of these rodeos and hate to miss even a day of fishing. HOWEVER... Although we started out with the possibility of getting in two or three days fishing, things did not go quite as planned. The fishing was actually too good!

I guess I have to admit another factor is we are all getting a bit older and can’t stand the exertion quite as well as in years past.

We left Ocean Springs prior to 7 am and headed out toward the Getty Rigs. Once we got on the water the day was a bit too hazy for me to be comfortable going out that far. The day before had seen strong thunderstorms move off shore into the gulf and that was a possibility on Friday as well. The reduced visibility could have let us get caught in a bad situation so I elected to stay closer to Horn Island.

We went out well beyond FH-3 where we saw three groups of shrimpers cleaning up after a night’s work. We were able to get a good bucket of chum from one of the boats and then the fun was on. We could catch fish as fast as we could get lines in the water. There were jacks, sharks, bonito, and lemon fish on all of the boats.

Most of the jacks were big enough to compete for a prize at the rodeo so we kept a big one on board and threw the rest back. The sharks were mostly black tips and were running a little smaller than usual. The majority were around 40 inches and we threw all but one back. We kept one to give to someone who requested one to eat.  There were plenty of large bull sharks in with them. One interesting thing I noticed was that the big jacks were coming in and biting the sharks we had hooked. Some had big tooth marks on the side and others even had plugs bitten out. I had never seen this before in many years of fishing out there.

The weather was very hot and pulling on all those big fish was sapping our energy very quickly so around noon we headed back to the island for some smaller fish. We found out we were really too tired to even move the boat around to find white trout so we decided to call it a day and head back in early afternoon. We threw the jack we were going to enter in the rodeo back in as we were both to tired to mess with going by and entering!

As we got closer to shore we could actually feel the temperature rising. It was close to if not over 100 degrees at the dock.

Cleaning up the boat was a real chore after catching all those fish and having to work in the heat but we got in done in an hour or so.

I am writing this on Sunday morning and I still feel the effects of pulling on those fish. I guess I need to scale down a bit on target fish if I want to try and do overnight trips. I still do want to go to the Gettys for some kings though. We will just have to see what the weather allows us to do.

Tight lines and smooth seas.

The band improvement seems to be continuing. It seems like 20 is staying open longer and is becoming more dependable with stronger signals from stateside and DX all the time. European stations are solid almost every day and the across the pole DX has really been going strong lately in the evenings after sunset.

I have had good stateside openings on ten for the past several weeks and even found six to be open from time to time. DX seems to be good on 17 and even 15 has started to show more signs of life though mostly Central and South America “back-door” DX with a good mix of islands thrown in to spice it up a bit.

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The club station I mentioned a while back at The University of Southern Mississippi has been issued their new callsign. The station is now W5USM. Look for them on the air soon.

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Field Day has come and gone. I did get out with the group on a couple of occasions but our set up left a lot to be desired. I will likely look for a competitive setup for next year.  ****************************

I have been doing some much needed work around the shack by rerouting the antenna cables through the wall and doing some work on the loop feed as well.

I will try and provide a detailed article on my way of recording audio for on-air playback as soon as I get time to add that to the page. I use a simple method that can be used with any rig with no modifications required.

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I end up replying to a lot of QSL cards and I do participate in e-QSL and LoTW as well. While I do not initiate e-QSLs, I do reply to them. I also upload my logs to LoTW every couple of days or sometime even more often if I have spent much time operating.

I guess that is about the run down from here so once again look for me on Field Day and I will be listening for you as well.  73 and great DX to all!