Pictures from the storm

What was weird about this storm is that is just came out of nowhere. I saw it in the Houston area early in the afternoon on the Sirius. There were a couple of isolated thunderstorms 85 miles to the east of us, nothing alarming. Made it to the hilltops with tile and barrel fish in mind. First drop, current is ripping. 9 p10 pounds of weight on the tile gear wasn't enough to keep the baits on the bottom drifting at over 2 kts. 1250 feet of water and had 2600 feet of line out on the lip's just to hit bottom. Wind has picked up out of the northeast, 1 ft chop. pull up one to add weight, meanwhile the other has come up off the bottom. Next thing I know rod is bouncing reel down and we're hooked up. Starting peeling the 120 diamond braid off the lp. This isn't a tile fish guys. 15 minutes into it we now have 3900 ft of line out and still pulling really strong. Wind is now 25 kts on my airmar weather station. seas are 3 ft with the tops getting blown off. Sky is darkening and this storm is building right in front of us. It's now wrapped itself around to the south of us from the Nansen area. It's like a half moon shape with all the wind being directed straight at us. We have a big swordfish dumping this lp and no time. I had to bump the drag up with hope of slowing this fish down. Line parted 380 ft up from the gear. Seas are now getting dangerous sitting in the trough. Waves are slapping the rule sides with breakers coming over the sides. Put the boat in gear while we are pulling up the 3000 plus ft of braid we had out. Tried running down sea but they were moving way to fast and the tops were breaking over the motors. Ended up heading 275 degrees towards Corpus. Within 30 minutes and 3 miles we had very dangerous what I would guess to be solid 8 footers with the occasional 10-12 and breaking. A few times I got the cat caught on top where the breaking wave got in the tunnel and spun us around and surfed us down the face like a boogie board. 600 cavitating horsepower was no match. I finally decided I needed to run the trough and turn up the wave face at about 30 degrees to keep them from grabbing us. This went on for over an hour. Highest wind speed I clocked was 52 kts sustained for over 45 minutes. My main concern was that if I didn't get far enough west before dark it would be impossible to navigate these seas after dark when you couldn't see them coming. Luckily the skies were clear on the western horizon and we had a beautiful sunset that kept the skies lit a little longer than expected. My port motor, the one that was taking the beating popped a cowling latch and I lost a couple of cylinders for a few hours. 3500 rpm wide open throttle. I can only assume the bottom coils got wet. Stopping the boat was not an option at this point. After 3 1/2 hrs of creeping it settled down and I was able to run 25 in the trough. The guys I had with me were lets say very concerned. The buoy weather forecast was 1-2 ft all night with seas building to 2-3 ft by Wednesday afternoon. Our plan was to be back at the dock by noon. Turns out we got back a little early. I'm glad it was't a busy Friday/Saturday because I have a feeling the Coast Guard would have been pretty busy. I wasn't able to take any pictures during the worst part of the ride but you can see it wasn't pretty.

Pictures from the storm