Hey Joe! I'm always tracking your fishing thread... merges one love with another, you brilliant son of a gun ;)
That property has tons of deer, turkey, some resident bobcats, and last year saw a piglet cross path (no bueno if signs of pigs). We get residential tags for thinning out the gator population (and you'd die laughing watching us).
I don't eat the reds... I just love catching them due to the fight (and hell... like any of us guys... we don't care if it's a whale or 2inch bluegill... we just like a "good tug" ... often... ;) ).
Now days I only keep non-fishy fish (triggers, sheepshead, spades, ... predominantly mollusk-eating fish) or cobia, flounder, and grouper (they don't taste fishy to me & low mercury levels). Spades coming in close to nearshore reefs soon. About 3 weeks out.
I told my buddy, Pete, he's a jackass for not cutting line with the marlin since it was a mahi-only tourney. But turns out the whole team egged him on because they knew he'd throw up afterwards and have a killer sunburn (which apparently has brought good luck to them in the past... I still would've cut the line to focus on target species... then again, Pete sunburnt and puking is pretty funny).
Pete's family has over 1000 acres on Johns Island, SC. It has been in the family for over 300 years. Multiple families still on property. VERY cool history. First cotton gin, unfortunately they had slaves early on and we've recovered tags, they found the signed document from King of England in a false wall of abandoned early generation house when the State directed them to find it in order to fall under a special tax regarding historical land, with that document they found several hundred books over 300 years old (his Grandfather drove old tractor into the wall on a whim thinking, "that wall just doesn't look right"!), ... here are a few pics of property on my latest drive out to the lake....
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