The Islander

I am travelling to Florida for about 8 weeks to work on the Islander, a luxury charter yacht captained by a friend of ours. The boat is in dry dock for some renovation and I will be joining the crew in cleaning and refitting as much as possible before the ship is put back in the water.
I believe that the dry dock (see map below) is run by St. Johns Ship Building, located near Palatka, FL. I will be staying in a house across the river. Hopefully, in my spare time, I will be able to track down some fish, and catch them.

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Bluegill Soup

Labor Day weekend, Tara and I took three of our friends fishing. Heather has been fishing with us before, but she had never actually caught a fish. Hang and Dapeng, two of our friends from China, had never even been fishing.
I knew the best way to remedy this situation was a tub of nightcrawlers and my favorite bluegill spot. I only have one light tackle spinning rod, so we had to take turns, but it wasn't long before everyone had succeeded in landing fish.

Dapeng with a hungry bluegill

Hang with her very first fish

Heather landed a big'un with the fly rod

Tara showing off her skills

Dapeng with a keeper

We had a great afternoon of fishing. Everyone easily caught fish with bait so I broke out a fly rod and let everyone take a turn at that. It turned out that nymphing produced the biggest fish of the day.

On our walk in, we came across this strange little fellow:

catching (up on) carp

Though I've only mentioned carp in one of the past six posts, I have been chasing them quite a bit. Here are a couple of photos from recent trips...