Boat Fever

I was on a slow burn.

You know - the kind of obsession that creeps into your mind and won't let go.

I had been thinking about all the fishing I had been enjoying at the Palacios Sea Wall and off the piers and started wondering about how it would be in a small paddle craft.

Paul had two kayaks and we have been in them several times chasing white bass in the East Fork of the San Jacinto and black bass in Lake Texana. We discussed the possibility of putting them in the salt water and trying to chase redfish, drum, trout & flounder in them but I somehow got to thinking about a sit-on-top kayak that was rigged up for shallow water fishing.

I found a cool website called Texas Kayak Fisherman and started reading the forum and looking at rigged kayaks. I also found other forums and kayak sites and soon had the coals stoked.

One afternoon I casually dropped a comment to brother paul that I was considering a fishing kayak and little did I know that I had just infected him with the dreaded "Boat Fever". If I had a mild case, Paul ended up with a full blown acute breakout. In the course of two days he had eclipsed my few posts on the TKF forum, visited every kayak retailer in the greater Houston area and announced that he was ready to purchase an Ocean "Speck" which was his boat of choice.

I had looked at the considerable field of available boats and had picked out a boat with different features. My #1 pick was a 14' Heritage Redfish. It wasn't long before Paul found through the TKF site that a guy in his neck of the woods had a Redfish and a place to launch and he invited Paul to come and give it a try.

That trip convinced Paul to abandon the Speck and he found that Wilderness Systems (the conpany that made his existing sit inside boats)made a SOT very similar to the Redfish called the Tarpon 140.

To make a long story short - we found a gentleman who was selling two boats on the TKF classiieds - one Redfish and one Tarpon 140. The rest, as they say, is history.

Paul put some nice pics out on his BLOG
.

I'll post some of mine when I can get Photobucket working.

I'm going to call my boat "Spot".
DJWB