Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire If you were there and packing, would you have shot him?

Yep, some of these guys wanting to pull the gun and do him dirty, are more like women than men..... Sounds like a boatload of gay liberals on board to me too... Couldn't handle one drunk skipper. Come on now...

no he just ignored his customers requests first by taking them much further out to sea than wanted
then on the way back he starting screwing around a few miles offshore refusing to return to dock.

They got a 17 hr boat ride despite having only paid for much less, and then had the temerity to complain.



A skipper relatively harmlessly firing six shots of his 9mm in the air from the bridge is enough to frighten
some of the campfire alpha males....makes one wonder what kind of sanitized unadventurous deadfck snowflake
boring life they have led.

Anyone have a link to his rates? Ive always wanted to fish off the coast of Florida.

I think they were paying for a fishing trip, not a boat tour. lol...

There will be more to this story as the Captain and First Mates versions are heard and the CG sorts out the BS from the facts.

His charter service is screwed no matter, the stories of this event are going to come up forever if a guy is researching for a trip online.

The reviews on Trip Advisor tell me a lot, his reviews have been way worse than any I have ever seen for a charter service consistently for the past year.

Even if this story has been exaggerated and blown outta proportion this guy most likely needed put out of his misery anyway.

Yesterday the first positive review in a year was posted to Trip Advisor by a "one review wonder" if ya know what I mean, it indicates there is another vessel/captain/crew working under the group "Double Nickel Charters", they are grasping for straws, too little too late, name change required....


I decided some years back that it would be better for me to book a couple of these charters a year than to invest in a suitable boat for offshore fishing.

The care and feeding of such a vessel wasn't penciling out to fit as comfortably into my budget as I wanted it to.

Figuring out exactly which charter to book with was quite difficult, most all the reviews online read exactly alike.
Yeah they are all great, yeah they all catch fish, blah, blah, blah.

Asking around with locals didn't prove to help either, everybody knows of a charter and yeah their friend or a guy they know is the best.

I had the opportunity to go from marina to marina in the Florida Keys and check out their boats and talk with the Captains or Mates, which ever happened to be present. There's a seemingly endless number of marinas in the Keys each with these gorgeous sports fishing boats lined up like ducks in a row. It took days..

With a 125 miles of islands, all with marinas providing charter services the challenge was daunting, I had to come up with some way to eliminate some of the options involved.

First thing was to learn more about blue water sports fishing and where these fish were at and when, that 125 miles of of islands surrounded by beautiful water isn't all created equal.

Yeah, you can catch fish all up and down the Keys but the waters off Islamorada stood out to be the hotspot for what I was seeking, that helped a lot.

I booked a room at The Postcard Inn on Islamorada and went to work on figuring this out.

Oh the distractions, this was the land of big boy toys and man did they ever have them....




I noticed right away there were many empty slips every day, these guys were out fishing. Then there were the guys that seemed to be tied up at the docks more days than not, they obviously were not as popular to book with, they also offered discounted rates pretty quickly when speaking with them.

I could of jumped on any charter I wanted to in Key West for $900.00 for a full day, these Islamorada guys were ranging from a grand to $1300.00. The guys that were at the dock the most would drop to 900 without even asking for a discount, some seemed so desperate to book a client I probably could have negotiated them down to 750 but it was those empty slips that I started focusing on.

I started heading out in the evenings to catch these guys after they returned from fishing for the day.
Now I started noticing a difference, these were the pro's, they caught fish, consistently, every day.
They also didn't have time to BS, they were tired, they'd been working all day, all they wanted to do was to clean up their boats and go home. They also didn't have any openings, they'd be two weeks out or even three before they had an available slot for a full day.
Most were at the top of the price range too, and you could tell it'd be insulting to attempt to get a discounted trip.

This narrowed my search, I was down to a couple dozen boats to choose from.

I learned one thing that told me a lot, they run "fish flags" up their outriggers after a days fishing that indicate how many fish and what kinda fish were caught for the day...

I had my target boats, I no longer needed to talk to them, I just cruised the marinas after dinner every evening for about a week seeing what flags they were flying and counting numbers.

There were two categories, there were the guys that pounded up every day on mahi-mahi or Dolphin which ever term you like best and occasionally had a Sailfish flag up. Thats probably great when you have a 6 client load on the boat, you can catch a lot of Dolphin, everyone will be going home with more than a cooler full of meat and sore arms from fighting fish all day.
Then there were the boats that were catching Sailfish and Marlin and occasionally had a Dolphin flag on their outriggers. This was my interest, now I was down to a small handful of boats.



All these marinas have a Harbor Master, sorta a booking agent but really more of a night security guard, I was getting to know them, they'd been chasing me off the docks after hours for a week. lol

They also had some good information once I let them know which boats I was interested in, it was like, "oh yeah, that guy's been here 25 years" or "he's kinda new but he's been catching fish".

I wanted the old timer, I wanted a guy with the years in, from the thousand plus charters available in the Keys I was now down to three boats.

One guy never returned my calls, boom, easy check off the list, next guy seem great but was booked solid on full day trips for the next six weeks, third guy had one opening two weeks out, I booked it. 1300 bucks, gotta figure a 15 to 20% tip for the mate, it was going to be a $1600.00 day, it'd better be good, damn good!

If this guy would have showed up buzzed with a bucket of beer and bottle I'd of shot him right at the dock.

Our day came, just two of us, we missed a couple fish due to our lack of experience in setting a hook, (learning curve) our first mate was getting more and more pissed before we got it figured out but once it happened we nailed 5 Sails a few King Mackerel and had a hellov'a day. We got what we paid for, every penny of it.

Funny thing was as soon as we got on the Sailfish our Captain made a radio call to another boat and gave him our quads and the depth we were fishing, when he made the call, low and behold it was my first choice boat. I told him I'd called that guy before I called him but his next slot was six weeks out, he said the two of them had been fishing that area for the last 25 years, they always shared there info. They were in completely different marinas..

I still book with these guys once or twice a year, they have never let me down, we've always put bill fish in the boat.

Did they catch any fish???

Shoulda just shoved el capitain overboard if anyone got close enough.

Throw chum all around him.
Let the sharks get him.
Snag up whatever was left, get it on board.
Head back to shore and come up with a solid story on how
Drunk el capitan fell in ocean and got killed by sharks..

Everyone needs to unwind once in a while.

I'll be danged that is Toby!

Well if i was ccw i wouldve watched his blood fill the boat after i shot him to [bleep]. Guy had it comin....