Gulf Shores Trip Day One

We hit the road at 3 am and stopped in Morton 20 minutes later to drag Justin out of bed and on towards the gulf! Thirteen and a half hours later and we were on the beach! Before we even went up to our condo we were all running for the ocean immediatley upon arrival. Noah's eyes were the size of golf balls when we were looking out at all the water. He was truly in awe and that was neat to try and explain. Anyhow, we had 2 hours of light left and put them to good use. Noah drove his tractor up and down the sand.

He also looked at me like I was crazy when I told him to get into the hole I just dug so I could bury his legs. We finally coaxed him in:

Drake loved the sand too! Way more than I thought he would. Brook was supposedly taking a whole bunch of pictures of Drake in his little hole with Justins phone, but instead we ended up with 7 of these short video clips. The pics would have been great, but at least we got something to remember his first time playing in the sand:

Justin was able to snap a few still images from his phone and just emailed them over so here are some of those pics of Drake playing in the sand afterall:

Mae and Brook weren't nearly as into playing the sand right away like us boys were. Mae was more interested in finding her cousins who were already down here. After we finished playing on the beach we unloaded all our gear, purchased fishing licenses online, and dumped the kids with their grandparents and headed out to Bahama Bobs for some food!

Since I already had a few boxes of $.99 spicy chicken nuggets from Wendy's for lunch, I was more in the mood for grilled Mahi Mahi sandwich than for my traditional fried shrimp or cajun crawfish. Here is that sandwich cooked and prepared to perfection:

For those who havent met me yet in person, I am actually a pretty large 285 lb individual. Since birth I have always been husky or big boned or double xl or however you want to candy coat the term BIG. Anyhow here is a pic of that sandwich disappearing pretty rapidly. Yes I have a big head and some big hands too.


This crayfish sandwich would have been my second choice:

The shrimp sandwich was my third choice. Brook and Justin were pretty embarrased of my taking pics of their food, but I am kind of used to being looked at funny by other people in public.

So there you go, the highlights from day one of gulf shores trip. Tomorrow I promised to let Brook sleep and I will watch the kids instead of going fishing early in the morning (the tides are bad for Thursday morning anyways....dont tell Brook, she thinks I am just being a great husband sacrificing my first morning of fishing for her.) It will be weeks later before she reads this and I will already be a hero husband and father for this whole trip at least!

These days I am not able to just fish nonstop, so I need to fish much smarter to maximize the time I do have. When a good tide coincides with the sunrise or sunset that is the time to be fishing in the gulf. I actually have those times and days written down for this week and will be hopefully coordinating all of the family activities and fishing trips for the week to be able to spend most of the best times on the water. For sure without a doubt I will be on the water Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning well before the sun comes up, those times will potentially be dynamite. There are quite a few other good times throughout the week, and I will be fishing at least a bit every day, but I definitely dont want to waste all of my alloted fishing time before those dynamite days!