Port A was great! The weather couldn't have been nicer and what a cute little town! The city was summed up for me when a local said "When you are driving into town. At, you know, the light." The light. Ok it's not THAT small but darn close! There is one main circle that is created by three or four streets and then there are few streets in between. Going "the long way" takes about 10 minutes and you have seen the WHOLE city!

But the important part of the trip was meeting JG's parents. They are very nice and seemed to like me! Yay! JG's stepmom is so sweet. I really enjoyed her company. And JG's father reminds me so much of my own father! Even down to the crazy wind blown hair! He loves to egg JG on too. Just like my father does with me. It drives JG crazy--well my father drives me crazy too.

After adding two hours of traffic to our drive leaving Dallas, we decided to stay in Austin on Friday night. We went to Trudy's for dinner...well, we went there for the Mexican Martini...mmmm...but we ate while we were there.

The next day we continued our trip to Port A and made it into town around 2pm. Saturday night we went fishing off of a pier near Charlie's Pasture which is a large expanse of nature preserve. We caught a couple Skip Jack but we threw those back. While we were fishing, there was also a Dolphin fishing nearby. Now and then we could hear him blow air out his blow hole and see him breach the water. It was pretty cool to see a wild dolphin that close to us.

Sunday was the big day, though. JG's parents hired a fishing guide named CL to take us fishing in the bay. CL is a portly man with skin so tanned his legs look wrapped in leather. He took us out on a tiny flat bottomed fishing boat to quiet cove off the bay that he had had luck in that morning. This type of fishing is not JG's favorite. CL would bait our hooks for us and even throw out the lines for us. JG prefers to do this himself, but he suffered for the rest of us!

At one point during the trip, JG, his father and his stepmom had fish on their lines, but I had had no such luck. Several times I had had a bite but the fish had his snack and bolted. About 20 minutes later, all three of them had fish on their lines again and I still hadn't caught anything. Everyone was getting a little concerned and apparently for a few minutes, CL had pulled everyone's line out except for mine to give me a better chance. I hadn't noticed this, however. But soon I caught a small Red Fish around 23 inches or so. This seemed to relieve everyone. CL seemed to relax a bit too. He seemed to take it as a personal offense that I hadn't caught anything and when I finally did he seemed happier.

Then I got another tug on my line. I thought it was another fish that would throw the hook and began reeling in the line as it started swimming toward the boat. It kept coming though. Then it swam close to the boat and I was able to reel in a good deal of line and follow it around the boat slowly shortening the line...Until it swam under the anchor rope. CL took the rod and passed it under the anchor rope to unsnag the fish but doing so royally ticked him off. He began swimming harder and all of the sudden I realized I had a BIG fish on the line. This was no 23" Red Fish. I fought with him for about 15 minutes and finally reeled him in to find out he was 30" of Bull Red Fish. He was over the limit. I had to use my one tag that I received with my fishing license. The tag allows you to keep one oversized Red Fish a year. But it was worth it. I was exhausted. I had caught the biggest fish of the day--for our run and the previous one our guide had been on. We continued fishing for another hour or so, and then headed back to the marina.

On our way we passed a huge tanker going through the bay. The tankers suck up so much water they change the shoreline. Apparently, there was a family who was unfamiliar with this because their boat had been beached when the water was sucked out. They were just milling around wondering what in the heck to do. I noticed a couple kids on the boat. Boy, won't that be a story that that dad will never live down!

Along with sucking water out of the bay, the tankers push water upward and forward as the cut through it. This creates something of a wave, and we watched five dolphins play on the wave that was pushing them foward. They would swim with the wave and then leap out of the water as though they were little kids in a pool standing on their friends cupped hands and being pushed out of the water to do a flip. They looked like they were having the time of their lives.

After we got back to the marina, we took pictures with our fish and were stared at...Apparently, we were one of few boats that came back with lots of fish. We had our fish cleaned and then we headed home to shower and change for dinner.

Dinner was a small restaurant called Castaway's. When you catch fish in Port A, you can bag it up, put it on ice and take it to Castaway's and they will cook it for you. So that is what we did. And man was it good!

After dinner we went home and played some poker and then crashed. Monday morning we had breakfast and then took off. It took us two hours to leave the island. a 3700 person town doesn't have a lot of roads for all of the tourists. But finally we made it. We stopped for dinner in Austin and saw TS. Then we continued on. We got in at 10pm. it was a 10.5 hour drive. It should have been 7 hours.

All in all, it was a great weekend. And now I have a freezer full of fish!