I recently had the opportunity to spend an afternoon in San Diego. The first place on my list was the USS Midway Museum.

The Midway is longest serving Navy aircraft carrier of the 20th century. She was commissioned after the end of WWII and has served in Vietnam and Desert Storm. Unfortunately I did not have much time to take pictures because I wanted to go through the entire tour and then go to the zoo, but I did managed to snap a few shots along the way. The Midway was by far the highlight of my stay at San Diego.

This past Sunday my buddy Alex and I were in search of the wild hog. Alex has never shot a hog before so I desperately wanted to get him one and also get it on video. Right off the bat I saw two deer, big deer at that. Those guys have to wait until archery season. Any how, we walked for about 1.5 hours before seeing our first hogs which were way to big to take. They were easily 200lbs and I am not draging something that big, not to mention draging it a mile. As we continued we finally found two that we were able to take, we stalked these guys for about 30 minutes before we decided there was a shot opportunity. Unfortunitly this day Alex forgot the “dead sled” so we had to drag this thing by her legs and it was a real pain. The heat index had to be a 100 degrees and humid as can be. I am pretty sure I don’t want to do that again. DISCLAIMER: turn up the volume, there may be some curse words, and the video is shakey as my heart was pounding and I was trying to watch where I was walking in an effort to not spook the animals.

So yesterday Capt. Rich Osgood and I got out for an attempt at fishing the falling tide. The wind and storms put a big damper on us but all was not lost. We landed a decent snook and trout before we had to call it quits and make a run for Rich’s buddy’s house. The lightning was everywhere and approaching fast; there was no way we were going to make the ramp. We stopped off and took shelter for about an hour where Rich cleaned his friend’s pool for him. (thought that was a nice gesture) So after this storm cooled off we were headed for home until we noticed some baby tarpon rolling around. I grabbed Rich’s fly rod and made a few casts. I had one eat by tarpon and ended up catching two lady fish. The fish were still rolling heavy and I told Rich, “hey if I was to end up hooking one of these tarpon I would like to get it on my fly rod”. Rich was more than happy to hook me up with a gurgler on the end of my line and away I went. I saw two fish roll next to each other. I made two false casts and dropped my fly about 5 feet from the rolls, I stripped about 3 times and BAMN! Fish on. I could not believe this was happening, what a high I got from this. To top it off we landed this bad boy. I have caught tarpon on rod and reel before but never on fly. In fact this was my first time ever casting to a tarpon with a fly. Thanks to Capt. Rich for setting me up in the right spot with the right fly and good instructions. Also, Rich gave me the fly which I will place in the frame with one of the photos taken of my fish.
Photo Note: Earlier in the day I was playing around with my new 8mm fish eye lens, Rich was taking photos with it and it’s all manual. We were to engrossed in the fish and didn’t want to risk changing the lens for losing the fish by me doing something dumb. Sorry some of the pics are not the best but I had to post them any how. Fish taken on furled leader with 20lb test on the end.