A decent grouper with a funny story behind it. I caught this fish on a party boat that our church's men's group had rented for the day. It was the big fish of the day and I won a fair bit of money for it.
Anyway, I was an assitant priest at that time, and also on the boat was my boss's son. I was supposed to be looking out for him, which I was.
When my boss saw this fish, he asked, "Why didn't my son catch that?" I never did come up with a good answer.
This pic indirectly shows how deeply connected I am to my wife. See how fat I am? That is sympathetic weigth gain during her first pregnancy. yeah, right.
Way back when I was a Youth Minister, one of the things we did was take some of the kids to Lake Michigan to fish for King Salmon. I don't know what was better--the catching or the eating!
This was my first snook that broke the 25lb mark. I look like I need some sleep, don't I?
The sharks I mention in the post below? This is a little one. It was caught in less than knee deep water. Remember that next time you are swimming in Florida.
OK, so this is not a very big fish. Dan catches them much bigger now...really! I need to get him to resend me the picture of his 10 lb bonefish...
I know there aren't any fish in this picture, but I figured while I was posting pictures of some of my fishing buddies, it was only proper that I included two of my favorites.
A graduate school buddy, Steve Palmer, with a nice king salmon taken from the Root River in Racine Wisconsin.
You no doubt immediatly recognize that I have slipped a picture of a girl in this album. That's because this is one of my favorite pictures. This was the first time we caught pompano, and frankly we didn't know what they were. You can tell that my daughter did not trust us to get the identification right.
Catching this tarpon required wading out through large and actively feeding sharks to get my bait out far enough. Before landing this one, two larger tarpon had completely emptied my reel of line without even slowing down. I walked this guy around out in the water until he recoverd, and then quickly ran back to my car, changed into my clericals, and made it for a 7PM meeting I had that night. Did I mention that it was my birthday? Oh, and despite questions to the contrary, I am wearing a bathing suit.