NUMB3RS

It's all about the numbers. No not FBI or lottery. It's about GPS numbers.

Before the era of GPS navigation systems, fishermen used to locate their favorite fishing spot offshore by plotting a course over a certain amount of time to get to an approximate point. Then they would either troll or drag a bar of soap over the bottom till they got to the exact (more or less) location they were seeking.

This location might be over a sunken wreck, natural reef, manmade reef, or even "hard bottom". But the experienced fisherman would know that there would be fish there. This method required a lot of skill and knowledge in order to be able to find the fish you were trying to catch.

Now it's all about the numbers: those grid coordinates as found on a map, expressed in degrees of latitude and longtitude. The best fishermen have their very top secret coordinates hidden away, never to be revealed to anyone, lest that person find the spot and catch "his" fish.

Which brings me to the accompanying photo. Ron Schlitt has some very good numbers. And when we go fishing with Ron, we catch some really nice fish, because he has the locations in his GPS chartplotter and they are really good spots.

This Red Snapper was caught in approximately 200' of water at one of Ron's Top Secret locations. It measured over 29" and compared to what we usually catch, it's nearly twice as big as the average. Naturally, it's the biggest one I've ever seen in my short offshore career, but he said it's the biggest one he's ever caught so it's BIG.