Blue water and white sand!  Those were the two elements necessary for my 40th birthday celebration this year.  We spent a week in the Dominican Republic at a great resort spending time with two of my life long friends and parents.  As you can tell by the pictures this is just an amazingly beautiful area of the world.  One of the highlights was our fishing trip, I have a hard time going somewhere on vacation where I do not mix in a little outdoors type recreation i.e. hunting or fishing.  So I hope you enjoy the pictures they are a lot more peaceful than the 8-10′ seas we encountered!  With all that we still landed a few beautiful fish!

The fleet preparing its morning run, I still get amazed by how beautiful the colors are in this part of world.

This may be the last smile from parents until we reach our resort on the return trip.

As you can see in the picture below – we were not quite out of the breakers and fighting some serious rollers that went from about 8-10′.  The sea made this 40′ boat feel like a raft.  Don’t ever estimate the sea, it can be a dangerous place.

The calm before the storm….not sure if it was the rough seas or all the rum we drank the night before?

Myself, Clark, and our first mate holding the catch of the day and doing what we could to stay in the boat!  My first true deep sea fishing excursion was tough but we still got a couple fish in the boat!  Here is to another 40 years!!