Casey Key – Thursday

We got to fish today!  While it is still very windy, there are no storms in sight and very little rain.  We woke to blue skies and white fluffy clouds.

Eric fixed my breakfast bagel (bacon, egg & cheese) and I enjoyed eating it on our covered porch.  Our upstairs friend, Blayton, was chatty as ever and joined us downstairs.  We went back to Blackburn Bay but even though we fished hard, we only came back with one trout that Eric caught.  He also got another Jack Crevalle and put it in our cooler.

By 11:30 am we were tired and hot and ready for lunch.  We wanted something different and pizza fit the bill.  Eric found a highly rated Italian restaurant in the downtown historic section of Venice and that became our destination.  We got there at 1pm and there was only one other table occupied.  We sat outside under cover and enjoyed the breeze that persisted even away from the water.  We started with a glass of wine as we enjoyed a tomato & olive oil dip with fresh bread.

I ordered a caesar salad and Eric got a cup of minestrone soup to start our lunch.  I still wanted pizza and they had several types available by the slice.  Eric ordered Eggplant Parmigiano.

His meal also came with dessert and we tried a limoncello cake – it was delicious and was dressed with a strawberry coulee.

We planned on fishing this afternoon, but it was just too hot.  Instead, we napped.  After all, we are on vacation.  🙂

Late afternoon we tried a different type of fishing for us – bridge fishing.  Our upstairs neighbors are well-versed in this type of fishing and having been doing it every day  AND have a large cooler full of mangrove snapper, black drum and a few redfish.  We weren’t really sure which bridge they were fishing from, but we headed south.  We tried one bridge and was turning around when we ran into them.  We followed them to a different bridge, observed their technique, made a few casts then headed back.  I got a good hit, but it bit off the line once it got close to the boat.  We decided that learning how to do this in the dark/dusk was a Darden recipe for disaster.

Dinner was a spicy seafood soup that Eric has made before on one of our other fishing trips.  He has been working on it for several days, adding bits and pieces of seafood that he has been gathering.  Along with shrimp there was crab meat (from the flame streak box crab) with the soup base being a fish stock using the Jack Crevalle he caught earlier.  On top of that was layered fennel, saffron and lemon juice.  It was very tasty and the artisanal bread from Publix was a nice accompaniment.  We spent the remainder of the evening on the back porch listening to country music and enjoying the quiet of Casey Key.