Capt. Ray No Doubt

George,

 I’ve been drafting this email in my head ever since my feet hit the dock after we stepped off the No Doubt yesterday. I often find myself sitting at my computer reading fishing reports you post on DEGS and dreaming about having a day out with one of your guides that is half as good as what I’m reading. We have fished with Ray before a few years back and knew we wanted another run at drum with him. All my worrying and dreaming was for nothing because there is No Doubt that on Tuesday Captain Ray put us on em.

I haven’t had the pleasure of fishing with any of your other guides but I can’t imagine anyone works as hard as Ray Massengill. There is absolutely no quit in that man. We pushed off at 7 am knowing that we’d have to cut things a bit short at 5 pm and be back at the dock..... We fished hard and by 11:15 we only had two drum in the boat. 

Let me say that I could have gone home happy at that point and I didn’t even have the fun of reeling one of those in. You hear a lot of people say that after 11 the bite turns off with the heat of the day and as time ticked by I wondered if we had gotten all the fish Gods had in store for us that day, but Ray got word over the radio that a school of menhaden were on the surface so he asked if we minded taking a ride a couple miles so he could net some. 

We happily obliged and knew that there would be an opportunity to run poppin corks through the bait balls to entice a bite. No dice on the poppin corks, but two throws with the cast net and Ray had more bait than 5 boats would have needed. 

Once again, Ray’s character shined through as he called Greg on the radio and gave him a bucket full. All of your guides seem to work great together. 

Ray doesn’t have much patience for a lack of action. I can’t tell you how many times he said we’d fish for 30 minutes only to sit on a spot for 15 minutes before Ray had us moving to find the bite. At around 2pm, in the heat of the day, when the drum supposedly aren’t as active and the bite isn’t supposed to be good, Captain Ray made it happen!   We caught (double digits)  between 2 and 5pm. We had 3 doubles. What a rush.  Ray never slowed down. All while we were reeling fish in he was baiting and re-baiting in hopes of “burning there ass up”. We left them biting for the evening crowd as we trekked back to the marina. No Doubt yesterday was the best day of fishing any of us could have hoped to have. Ray has nothing but good things to say about both you and Anna and DEGS. I hope to join you down in Costa Rica in the next few years1

 Best,

Jason