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Our little blogger vacay at Club Med Columbus Isle wasn’t all sand, beach and unlimited cocktails – honey, we worked HARD for our food! I landed this 45 pound wahoo with the help of hunka-hunka Clyde the boat captain.

Clyde has been taking a group of visiting chefs from the Food and Wine Festival out to fish every day to catch good eats for dinner. On this particular day, I went with Diane, Alex (husband of Smitten Kitchen Deb), Matt, Adam and Steve-Anna (Elise‘s friend) The pressure was ON to catch something for dinner…otherwise all 80 of us would be eating stale cracker crumbs.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I sorta was expecting a big fishing yacht. Okay, I was WISHING it was a big fishing yacht, and instead we got on a boat big enough for 4 monkeys and a jackrabbit. There were 4 long, strong fishing poles on the boat, each pole chained to the boat, which I thought was kinda dumb because what if we snagged something massive like a 600 pound shark?? And what if that said shark yanks the pole like a bamboo skewer and flings the boat back and forth…all because the damn precious pole was chained to the boat.

So, anyways, Kevin the co-captain drove while hunka hunka skewered dead sardines onto the hooks to use as bait. He then sprinkled some powdered seasoning on the dead sardine (he said it was powdered brine which helped preserve the sardine…but personally I think it was a bit of Old Bay Seasoning which is always good on seafood) and threw the bait out in the water.

Twenty minutes later, the reel thingy started spinning like outta control crazy and hunka hunka leapt towards the pole, ordered me to sit in the “hot seat,”  put my feet up and brace myself.

Hunka hunka then positioned the big, thick fishing rod RIGHT BETWEEN MY LEGS and yelled “Reel, baby REEL!!”

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Big fish. Such fighting power between my legs!

After 4 minutes of orgasmically wrestling with the fishing pole….I needed a quick rum break.

And then, he finally came.

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It was so much fun that one of us DID IT TWICE, and another (wince) had a premature release — the fish got away.

But look, we each got one!

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So, what did we do with the fish?

One word…

Dinner.

This is Chef Sean Bernal of The Oceanaire Seafood Room, the most talented seafood man I know.

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Look how clean he fillets the fish….WOWZA. That’s sexy.

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My friend Diane took all these pics!

The Best Welcome Home Ever

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More Fish Action

sheephead-fish-cbs I was on CBS in Tampabay and talked about our trip and how to buy seafood.