Ltj Big Drum

[Steve F]

I had Uncle Phill and Weatherman Dave with me today and we headed out at first light looking for the fish that Phill and I got into last week. Well here is what happen…We pull up to the spot and all we can see are rays and a lot of them but I have some good marks on the meter. I tell Phill and Dave to drop down and see what happens, well Phill and I get in the water first while Dave is getting his gear ready. Phill and I are jigging are asses off and then Dave finally gets in the waster. He jigs one time and all of the sudden his drag is screaming and Phill and I look at each other and just know it’s a ray, great first fish of the day and it’s a stinking ray. Well Dave is battling this thing for over 15 minutes and I have the knife ready to just cut the line. 20 minutes go by and then the fish comes up to the top and Phill Dave and I see it and say OH SHI# it’s a BIG DRUM. It takes off again and Dave is hanging on for dear life. About 35 minutes goes by and Dave is now bring the fish to the boat and I lean over the side and grab the biggest fish I have every seen or had on my boat and heave it over the side of the boat. This damn thing is huge so we take about 6 photos of her and then back in the water she goes and we took our time reviving it. We estimate it over 80lbs and about 48 to 50” long I guess. After Dave catches his breath we went right back to the same spot and I’ll be damn if Dave did not drop down again and hook up another one and this may have been just a little smaller than the first one but it was BIG. He fought this one for about 30 minutes before he got it to the boat and that one was released as well. We had about 170lbs of fish in the boat in the first hour. I have to say that Dave did a great job of brining both of these fish in.

Now who said you can’t catch big fish on light tackle, Dave was using a 6’6” M/H Backyard Custom Rod (just had to get that one in) that I had built him and had 12lb power pro on his reel.

By the way striper fishing today sucked for us, we caught a lot of dinks but that was it but that did not matter because all we kept talking about was those 2 monster drum that Dave caught. It was good seeing Dave and Paul, Chris, Tim and Johnny O out there today I hope you guys did good in the tournament

If anyone would like for me to email them the pic's so that they could post them for me I would appreciate it.