Half Hitch Tackle offers monthly fishing forecasts for Port St Joe, Panama City, and Destin, along with a lot of other great information.

Found a great article on a recent Mako tournament at Marinernetwork.net. They hooked up a large Tiger shark during the 3-day event, and quite a few smaller fish.

An excerpt:”Unfortuantely for us (yet fortunate for the shark), the OC Shark Tournament is organized as a conservation tournament and Tiger sharks are off limits for weigh in. We were now fishing for release points. After having the bimini twist enter and subsequently exit the roller guides 30 or 40 times more times, we got the feeling we may have been fishing with light tackle and we definately “needed a bigger boat”. We finally got our release and our picture (with the angler, the boat number arm band, and the shark all in one frame - don’t asked me how we accomplished it). The fight took 2 hrs and 41 min and we estimated the fish at 15ft long and 800+lbs. “

The website Destin-ation.com offers a good list of charter fishing captains and boats in the greater Destin, Fort Walton Beach, and Northwest Florida area.

The Northwest Florida Daily News reported the catch of a 9′ bull shark about 2 miles offshore from Destin yesterday.  They don’t seem to have the article online and I’ve yet to find a good a secondary source for more information.  Please send us a line via the comments if you have additional information!

We’re looking forward to an extended boating weekend coming up.

July 4th fireworks kickoff at Hurlburt Air Force Base on Saturday July 1st starting about 9pm. We like to watch from just east of Spectre Island and will be anchored up there weather permitting no latter than 7pm. If you’d like to join the DestinSharks raft-up, look for our Regal 2760 ‘Southern Comfort’. We’ll likely have a big inflatable shark on our bow to help us stand out.

On the 4th, you can choose between Niceville (Boggy Bayou), Fort Walton Beach (Fort Walton Landing), or Destin Harbor. These shows all start between 8:30 and 9pm.

Whatever you decide to do, please boat safe and have fun!

We’ve updated our sidebar to include quick links to current marine weather and tide predictions.

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Recently the NOAA added “Raster Navigation Charts” or RNC’s to their chart download section. “Electronic Navigation Charts” or ENC’s have been available for some time.

RNC’s are visual replicas of paper charts - essentially large digital images without the compression artifacts of jpegs. RNC’s will look the same across different software viewers.

ENC’s are quite different - they are more similar to mapping files for electronic chart plotters. ENC’s encode each element on a map (marker, depth contour, light, etc.) as a unique entity with a set of attributes depending on its type. The look of ENC charts depends on the particular software used to view them. ENC’s take less memory than RNC’s.

Read on for our recommended RNC/ENC viewer and downloads for Northwest Florida map files.

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A light south wind, not-to-hot temperatures, and an incoming tide made for a great day at “crab island” today. We didn’t get out until afternoon, but everyone had a great time.

We did a marketing trial with DestinSharks.com banners on our Regal and seemed to get a good response. Larger, vinyl banners are on order and should be ready as early as next week.

The full set of photos is posted at SLRsite.com
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We’ve posted video from Austin’s 6′ bull shark he caught last fall in 3′ of water.  Also pictures of Sarah’s 7′ bull caught near Destin from our 20′ Chaparral.

See it HERE

Kenwood CD changer receivers are widely installed in current boats and autos - although the actual installation of the remote CD changer is less common. In my case, I inherited a late-model Kenwood receiver in our new boat. Rather than bother with the built-in CD player or a changer upgrade, I have been researching how best to interface the Kenwood with my collection of portable MP3 players - most recently an iPod Video. This post details what I’ve found to date on interfacing options and their relative pros, cons, and costs.

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