Mon Oct 15 2007

Night before last was the briefing for the 21st Lizard Island Tournament, and we arrived after running and fishing our way from Cooktown after resupplying and picking up RJ, John and Brandon, all good friends of ours from Florida.

The tournament briefing was a debacle as usual, with our anglers ordering and paying for 6 dinner tickets back in April, were told that we were only given 5!!!, Tough luck was what they were told.

So if you didn’t have a ticket you couldn’t get in and missed out on dinner and the 1 security guy was giving those without tickets a large amount of grief. Then the briefing and calcutta did not finish until after 11.30 pm, the result of which is once your boat was done , everyone from that boat went home.

Morning of day 1 saw the wind howling back to its normal 25 knots from the SE and the sailpast was fine, with a chopper taking footage of the 43 boats in the bay. Then the “Bimini Start” was the most dangerous thing I have ever seen!!!!

For some reason there were 2 rows of boats, all pointing to the same point to get around the island!!! I was waiting for everyone to take off and pull in behind somewhere for a nice ride south, but with another 10 boats coming at me had no choice but to take off and get caught up in the mess.

We ran south with Reel Chase, Viking 11, Maritimo, Shaka, Moana and few others who were running the inshore route. The ride down was not too bad, running at around 18 – 20 knots was nice and comfy on the nose.

Shaka won the ride down, it is amazing what another 10 feet, extra 1000 hp and $3 million can do!!! Eating it up she was.

Fishing was overall slow, with a couple of boats catching 2 fish, including Reel Chase with small (200 lb) fish, Sharky on his new Maritimo had 3 bites and tagged 1 and a couple of non tournament boats had a few bites down on #2 and #3 which is where we will be today after swim.

Tim
www.TraditionCharters.com