The  Emerald Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau has granted the Rodeo $70,000 to be used to bring visitors to the 2010 Rodeo!  This is pretty exciting because these are CA$H prizes not just the trophies and fishing rods like they usually have. Apparently BP gave the area some money to try to promote tourism and the rodeo got a cut of it. Good news for you fishermen out there!

Here is the list of cash prizes:

King Mackerel,       Amberjack,         Black Fin Tuna,       Snapper
1st Place $6,000         2nd Place $3,000          3rd  Place $1,000

Now you may be looking at the “snapper” category and saying to yourself “hummmmmmm? I thought snapper was closed”. Well we said the same thing since red snapper season closed on the 23 of July this year. I just went to the rodeo web site and they have not updated it in a year so there was no information there. They may be talking about black snapper, mingo, lane, who knows? I e-mailed the head of the rodeo a couple weeks ago and have not gotten a reply yet but I will keep you posted.

They are “talking” about opening red snapper season up again since this has been a year that very few have been caught due to the fact that most of the boats were not fishing but working for BP. There are some that want the quota that we did not reach this year to be added to our quota for next year to enable us to have a longer season and there are others that want to have it opened this year just so we can have a decent fall season. It’s all “wishin’ and hopin’”. The feds are the ones that ultimately decide what you are going to get and they’ve proven time and time again that they could care less about any input we may have  so, as usual, we are at the mercy of our great and oh so powerful federal government who will decide what kind of fish you will catch, how many and when you will catch them. We will see.

We’ve already got trips booked for October so don’t wait too long to reserve your day. We’ve got some great regular October people that look forward to fishing with us. We love the repeat business, we see the kids get bigger and it’s like your family has come back to visit! Call us, we want to hear from you y’all know Mark loves to talk about fishing!