Inlet at dawn, 20 miles out by lunch

Rob Arrington has fished from a lot of boats on camera. Deer Meat For Dinner is built on catching your own food and showing the whole thing, water to table, and the boat is always in the frame. About six months ago the boat became an East Cape 25 Open with an upper station, named the Lali 1. This trip was the first time our team fished it with him.

Before the sun

The day started at the ramp with a well full of croakers. Rob’s rule is simple: good bait, good fish. The first redfish came before there was light to film by, the second a few minutes later, and the third was the keeper. Then, the way it goes some mornings, the bite shut off. Side scan showed the fish had moved, and nobody could say where.

That is the moment a bay boat goes home. The 25 Open is not a bay boat.

20 miles out

The call was to run offshore and mark bottom. Same boat, same crew, same croakers. The first drop produced a cobia big enough to keep, brought around the boat and onto the deck with room to spare. Sharks took the next few fish on the way up, which is life on the reef right now. Then a fish came up that fought wrong for a snapper, did not want to leave the bottom, and turned out to be the biggest American red snapper Rob has caught. The video title is his, and it is not an exaggeration.

The wind built through the late morning, so the run in was early and the ride home was the part nobody films. That is also the part the hull was built for. Rob said it on deck: you can fish everywhere with this boat. The inlet at dawn and the ledge at noon, without changing boats.

Cooked for the crew

The fish did not go far. The next day Rob set up a table outside the shop in Longwood and cooked redfish on the half shell, with corn and rice, for the people who built his boat. His reason was the one we would give too: without the right people, nothing gets done, and many of ours have been here a long time.

He walked the floor with a camera and asked people what they do. Finishing, consoles, rigging, making customers happy. The answer to the last one was that it is easy to say and hard to do.

What an owner remembers

The boat conversation on the floor was about small things, not the big picture. Hidden tackle storage so nobody hauls bags on and off every day. A Starlink mount that comes off in a minute when it needs to move to another vehicle. A custom radar mount on the tower that sits just high enough to clear the top without shading and still stays low. Rob trailers the boat to the Gulf side and to Louisiana, where fog is real and radar is not optional.

That is how every East Cape gets built. Someone arrives with a picture of the whole boat, and the team spends its time on the details that make the boat easier to live with. Every one is different.

Rob’s boat stayed with us for a few days after the trip so a full deck of traction pad could be templated and fitted. Then it went back to work.

The boat

The 25 Open is the open-water boat in our lineup. It runs offshore on the days the skiffs stay inside, and it fishes the beach and the inlet the rest of the year. It does not run skinny water, and we will not tell you it does.

Watch the day above. Rob’s other trips on the Lali 1 are on his Storytellers page, and when he is not filming, the boat runs charters out of Ponce Inlet through the Guide Network.