Sunken Dreams

It was the flounder pounder weekend 2015, a weekend I had been looking forward to for quite some time. Seth, Greg and I tried our hand again at the Bahia Marina tournament. We were well stocked with tackle and freshly caught peanut bunker. We signed up for the tournament and waited in the basin until the horn sounded. Just as it was about time for the tournament to get under way the guy in the boat next to me said, "hey your back end looks low." After checking it out with the tournament director we determined that our pontoons were taking on water and we needed to back out of the tournament. We felt lucky that they gave us our money back and decided we would test the boat out for a half hour and see if the issue got any worse. Well as luck would have it it didn't take long until Greg hooked up with a beautiful flounder. We decided to keep a close eye on the pontoons checking every half hour to see if they worsened and they appeared stable. It appears we had a slow leak in the welding that had occurred over time but there wasn't any immediate concern. At that point we decided to keep fishing but switch it up and fish the 50 bridge for big blues and stripers. We had some great battles and were broken off by many big fish at the pilings. We decided to go and have the flounder weighed at Oyster Bay just to see how we would have faired in the tournament.  Sure enough, we had the biggest fish by far and lost out on several thousands of dollars in winnings. We still had a great weekend catching (including a couple of roughly 30 inch blues that were released) but left with an expensive salty wound. Here's the video documenting the action. http://youtu.be/uA9mtjRlAFY