By Rich Miller
Several weeks before we left to go on vacation, we were at my buddy Rich’s house and he had brought his big boat up from Florida to have some work done to it. During the conversation, it came up that we were going to Edisto for the week and he said he could bring his boat down and – weather permitting – we could go offshore a day or two. I told him that was fine with me; we would check the forecast for that week and if it looked promising to bring it on.
That week, the weather kept changing and finally on Wednesday he decided to come on down and we were going to go for it on Thursday morning. I had contacted a long time friend of mine that lives in Charleston to come down and fish with us because he has a lot of knowledge of the area. He had to work the night before and came to the house as soon as he got off of work. We were loaded up and headed out about 4 am. It was pretty smooth on the way out and the seas weren’t nearly as bad as what was predicted.
We made good time and it took us about an hour and a half to get into a 190’ of water. We dropped lines there and started fishing. We hadn’t been fishing but about 10 minutes when we caught the first dolphin. About thirty minutes later, the rod I was standing beside went down and I was hooked up. After having the fish on for a few seconds, he came out of the water and it was a sailfish. My brother-in-law that was with us had never caught a sailfish, so I told him to get over here and get the rod. He has tried for several years to catch one, but every time he gets one on, something seems to go wrong and he ends up getting off.
On this day his luck changed, though, and after about a 10-minute fight he landed his first sailfish. After a few quick pictures, we released the fish and put the lines back in the water. We hadn’t been fishing an hour and had already had one meat fish and a good Atlantic sail in the boat so the rest of the day we were on easy street. Not to mention, you couldn’t have wiped the smile off of my brother-in-law’s face with Ajax!
We fished until about 4pm and caught fish pretty much the whole day. We did lose two fish that we never got to see, but we think they were Wahoo. After it was said and done we had 10 dolphin, 2 barracuda, and 1 sailfish. That was a super day for us to not fish that area very often, even though we did bring a ringer with us. We made it back to the dock and our little boys couldn’t get away from the fish. So we took more pictures and told everyone all about the trip while we filleted the fish. Now all we have to do is get the grease hot!
