Fun days running a charter boat business

I am reading a book, “Wit and Wisdom of An Old Outdoor Guy,” by Vin T. Sparano, who was my editor when I was a field editor at Outdoor Life. I would like to think we became friends after I joined the New York Metropolitan Outdoor Press Association. Through that group, I was able to meet, spend quality time with, and learn from the best writers in the business. In return, I was able to bring them down to Delaware for some fantastic goose hunting and to Santee-Cooper, S.C., for excellent hunting and fishing in the Deep South.

The chapter in Vin’s book that got me thinking about my days as a charter boat owner was titled, So You Want to Buy A Charter Boat and Fish For Free? Yeah, Right!

Vin’s venture in the charter boat business did not work out too well. Mine did much better. He bought a very nice Hatteras. I had a 24-foot Albemarle. He paid a captain and mate. I was both. He had to feed two big diesel engines. I had a single gas engine. The list goes on.

I never had a bad party. In fact, I had a great time even when the fishing was slow.

One party comprised a mother and her daughter. We were fishing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel for croakers, or anything else we could find, and the ladies were having a good time, although the cooler was far from full.

As the day wore on, the temperature rose, as it does in Virginia Beach during the summer, and both ladies stripped down to their bathing suits. As compared to the suits the ladies wear today, the ones they wore were modest, but they did attract the truckers on the bridge, who began to blow their horns.

It took a while, but the mother finally asked why the trucks were all blowing their horns. I said because you and your daughter are wearing your bathing suits. Well, that did it – they both began to wave at the trucks and forgot all about fishing. I finally had to move away from the bridge for fear of causing an accident.

Another party comprised two guys from the Midwest. They had never seen the Chesapeake Bay or the Atlantic Ocean, so I took them for a short trip to the ocean before anchoring up in the bay to fish for cobia.

My cobia fishing setup consists of putting out a chum bucket and two rods baited with fresh bunker. While we wait for a cobia, I have the party fish on the bottom with bloodworms for croaker, sea mullet or anything that happens by.

We didn’t have to wait very long before one rod went off, only it wasn’t a cobia, it was a cow-nose ray. That was just fine with the party. Both guys were whooping and hollering and having a ball. The ray was giving the angler all he could handle and he was loving it. We never did catch a cobia, but the cow-nose rays kept coming. That was just fine with my party. A fishing trip that would have been a bust for a local group turned out to be a success for two guys from the Midwest who had never seen anything like a cow-nose ray.

I found out during a lull in the action that both guys were partners in a topless bar back home. When we got back to the dock, the two young ladies who were waiting for them were wearing bathing suits that would rival anything you see on the beach today. Only this was the 1990s, and they pretty much had every male eye in the marina fixed on them.

I even took lawyers fishing.

I had three lawyers who booked me for an inshore charter around the Bridge-Tunnel while they had a sort of meeting, so they could deduct the cost as a business expense. Fishing was slow, but we picked at croaker and blues until I hit a hot croaker spot, and one of the lawyers said he had been planning to recommend that place when we started fishing. I told him the next time he fished with me, he should speak up and not wait until the trip was almost over to share knowledge.

A short time later, I was asked to be an expert witness in a case where a captain had run too fast over a ship’s wake and tossed one of his passengers off her seat, injuring her back. The opposing counsel was the same lawyer who knew where the croaker hot spot was. Fortunately, he accepted me as an expert without any questions.

Vin’s book is available from Amazon, and I believe you will enjoy the stories.