Two officers, five members, one first time guest and one daughter (nine total participants) had a good time at the Annual 8/24/07 - 8/26/07 Non-Chartered Coastal Fishing Trip near Port Aransas. Ronnie Ross, Kevin Wall, and Mark Moore did pretty well at Mud Island. Mark landed 24 and 28 inch Reds while fishing from shore. Ronnie and Kevin also caught numbers of Reds and Trout. First time guest Gavin Goodrich caught a 23 inch trout. My party (Tim Price and my wife, Chris, and daughter, Deanna) didn't do quite as well. Tim caught a nice Skip Jack and a few hardhead catfish. I caught a Skip Jack, a Red, a Sheepshead, a hard fighting 4 lb. hardhead, and a couple more hardheads. Chris caught a couple of hardheads and a perch.
Both Ronnie and Tim had engine problems but were able to resolve them. The worse thing that happened was about 3:00 PM on Saturday near Mud Island. We were mainly catching hardheads so we decided to try further down Mud Island. Tim started to head towards what looked like deeper water. He then turned towards the island. Suddenly a wave crashed over the bow, swamping it with water. Tim gunned the engine and steered 90 degrees to starboard but that just made the bow dive under the water like a submarine. In the blink of an eye the boat rolled to the right and we capsized. Tim got on top of his boat and waved down a large bay boat. They towed us to 3 feet deep water. We were able to right the boat and bail it out. They then towed the boat back to Port A. We learned the weight limitations of Tim's boat as well as the importance of keeping life jackets un-stowed. Even if we weren't over loaded (we didn't think that we were as we had four men in the boat during the 1/26/07 - 1/28/07 Blast and Cast) we would have had real trouble in the ship channel was the waves were monstrous at 5:00 PM. Needless to say we both lost considerable equipment. For future trips we are going to strongly discourage anyone taking a boat that is not designed for the coast (at least a bay boat). This will limit the number of people who get to fish off of a boat but safety is far more important than having the reach that a boat provides.
Six of us camped at Mustang Island State Park. Three camped on Mud Island.