excellent raymanship

If you follow me on Instagram, you might remember that after my deer hunt last Saturday, I had plans to try and hook a tarpon. I was lucky enough to get an invite on the boat with John’s dad and some friends, having been left ashore by the rest of the boys participating in the Lowcountry Tarpon Tournament. It’s ok, guys… I guess. Just kidding. It was [still] a super hot day and the ocean breeze is exactly what I was needing.

We headed out to try our luck at the jetties, having had the same idea as quite a few others. Bait was a-plenty, the GoPro was fully charged, coolers were full, and we had high hopes that we could just maybe beat the guys in the tournament with our tarpon catch(es) for the day.

Parker tossed out the cast net and we started fishing. Parker is John’s dad, by the way… Not sure if I’ve ever clarified that here before. I feel like y’all (yes, you, my invisible internet friends) just know the people I mention in my tales. Thank you for bearing with me, if you do not.

Wow. Back to the story at hand, huh? Lines went out, and we settled in for our day of fishing. It was a slow start, to be sure, but we were confident in our collective fishing abilities to not get skunked. Skunked we were not. I’ll save you the dramatic lead-in, though. To make a long story short, we did not catch a tarpon. In our defense, no one around us at the jetties caught one either, at least not while we were out there. I’ll tell you one thing though – our raymanship was TOP. NOTCH. What is “raymanship,” you ask? The catching of stingrays. Our sharkmanship (the catching of sharks, in case you hadn’t caught on yet) wasn’t too shabby either.

“But Hollis,” you might be thinking, “who really wants to be catching stingrays and sharks when you’re really after tarpon?” Well, friend, we didn’t, in fact, want to be catching those guys. We’d much rather have hooked up to a tarpon or two, or even a nice bull red fish. Alas, such was not our luck that day. You know what though? I’ll take a sunny day on the boat catching whatever bites my line over a day at the office or sitting on the sofa. Am I right? We moved inland from the jetties to try a few more spots, but had the same “luck” with stingrays and sharks. We ended up with 7 rays and 3 sharks. By the end of the day, we couldn’t keep the stingrays off of our lines, and it became our running joke for the afternoon. We had such a good time just being out on the water, the whole day was worth it.

I did try to get some cool underwater GoPro footage of our catches once we got them to the boat and released them, but most turned out like this:
 Womp womp wommmp. I did catch a jelly ball floating by, though.
We landed our last 3 stingrays in about 5 minutes… Something I clearly thought was hilarious.
By late afternoon, it was time to head in. A big summer grumpy was brewing, and no one wanted to be caught in open water by a giant storm. A storm that was between us and the landing. Fun stuff.
Just before we pulled up the anchor, I spotted something unusual on a sandbar a few hundred yards away from us. I could tell it wasn’t a seagull or other seabird, so I got out my camera to make use of the super-zoom lens and confirm my suspicions. Can you spot it?
What do you know? A bald eagle out for a beach stroll and some crabbing. Pretty cool, huh? I always see them flying around out there, but have never seen one do this before.
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