Orange Beach for 3-Days - Oct 4-6, 2019© Photos Posted by Mark Primo Miller © Hi-Res Source
This was a great Primofish trip. I did this once before and had such fond memories of it where we took a 3 day weekend leaving Mississippi and docking in Orange Beach Alabama at a rented Condo comlete with boat slip. On board was Todd Cospelich, Omar Vasquez, and Garret Bible. So the Pensacola Classic Lionfish Tournament (hosted by the Coast Watch Alliance>) was going on with a one day shootout for Saturday and weighin on Sunday. Then Alabama announced an opening of Red Snapper for the 3-Day weekend since the quota was not caught. So our plan was to leave my house in Mississippi on Friday, run out to the Shelf for big Amberjack, come into Alabama getting some Red Snapper on the way, and docking at our Condo Rental at Poro de Sol. Wake up Saturday and shoot Lionfish and Red Snapper, hopefully getting lucky enough to get either the smallest or largest fish for $1,000 (or both!). We already knew we didn't have the spots for quantity like some of the locals. Anyway, although we were dissapointed with the size and quantity of AJs at MP260, we got some decent fish closer in at MP225. We then came in closer and even tested out my new PRIMO-CamCheck which is a PVC device I made up to drop on a fishing rod with an extended pipe to see how the visibilty was before wasting air on some of our deep spots. We are often plagued with poor bottom vis that moves in and out so it would save us time and air. It worked pretty well. We got our Snapper as planned and had a great evening in Orange Beach. The next day, we did the Pensacola Classic. See that trip on a separate post, but I repeated the video for it here. While we only got 13 Lionfish total, we succeeded at getting the largest one (439mm or 17.3"), good for $1,000! The smallest lionfish was only 1.46 inches, captured by Brady Hale of Dallas, Texas. The winning team, Dreadknot, led by Capt. Josh Livingston of Destin, brought in 419 Lionfish. A total of 1492 Lionfish were taken during this one day event. See the results below. Total first day trip encompassed 164 miles, 112 gallons of fuel, and 13 hours. Second day encompassed 54 miles, 37 gallons of fuel, and 8 hours. Third day got rough and we just ran back instead of fishing although I offered a rig dive that only Garret wanted to make. I was hesitant due to his lack of experience solo diving and some lack of confidence with Omar's boat handling in these conditions so we went on home. That day encompassed 77 miles, 47 gallons of fuel, and 5.5 hours.
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