Slooooooww for us all day as far as big grouper were concerned. My son Chris, My foreman Tim, and Knot Now Phil took a generous scoop of mackeral and sardines down to the lower end of the 9 Saturday where we worked the outskirts of the crowd; we figured the macks would nail big fish for us but is wasn't to be. We did however catch quite a few nice reds in the 3-4# range on sardine strips and after giving up on the bocaccio we headed for the south wall to take a shot at some lings later in the afternoon. For all the pressure that was there before us; I think we did OK as we took 3 cookie cutters from 28-30" 8-9# and Phil managed a 24" ling. We told Phil we had a 26" size limit on lings on our boat before we started fishing for them and when he held it up and couldn't quite stretch it out long enough. As he was getting ready to toss the fish back over the rail he had that look in his eye of disbelief so when we told him that 24-26" was kind of a gray area depending on how successful the trip had been we all agreed the ling would look better on Phil's plate for dinner. I wished we had tried for lings earlier as the fishing was quite good with alot of bites on mackeral ; but we were out of time so we pulled the lines in after that and headed for weigh in; Tim's biggest of 2 lings was 2 ozs behind the leader and our 5 fish weight of 14.8 was dismal. Beautiful ocean and not alot of wind but the current was ripping! They said the banquet was great as usual but a little drawn out;silent auctions, live auctions, so much sitting time it's hard to stay awake from 3AM to 9PM. Had a great time with Phil and wish we could have caught some bigger fish and that's the worst total weight I've ever had in that tourney; maybe we are fishing those bocaccio out! Phil and I talked on the bridge in route and compared our guage readings, electronics and their use, what what the next toy we both need will be. I did get the feeling he's had enough of the 1.95:1 outdrive ratio on the Doghouse; his 1.72:1 ratio gets at least 2-3 kts more speed for the same RPM. He's really trying to talk me into a new D4 !