This was my first time offshore fishing. The day started with the captain telling me 4-5 times that “too bad you booked a half-day trip” “A 3/4 or full day would be much better if you want to catch fish.”  Right off the bat, I felt like he wasn’t excited about having us there and was already assuming that we wont catch much. I’m sorry but if you don’t like taking 1/2 day trips don’t offer them. But since you do offer them maybe have a few spots picked out that are manageable for half day trips. Once underway, we stopped to catch live bait. We hauled in quite a few and then we were off. When we go out we started trolling dead bait because we were told we could cover more ground faster. After trolling for an hour with nothing to show, we finally got a bite. It was a tiny mahi. We asked the captain why we weren’t using the live bait we stopped to fish for and we were brushed off with “we can cover ground faster with dead.” “Once we find the fish we can use live.” I am not a captain of a boat or a deep sea fisherman but I do fish a lot and if the fish aren’t biting what you are throwing out, you need to change your bait, location or both. We did not do any of the above for the entirety of the trip. We also had a couple instances where the first mate was not checking the bait regularly and we were trolling along with half eaten bait. Not the best way to catch fish. We caught 3 total fish during a half day and 2 of the 5 of us never touched a pole. 1 of the kids fell asleep on the boat while we were trolling. I guess it wasn’t a total bust but the crew of the boat didn’t seem interested in our party or our fishing trip at all. They were more interested in discussing whether or not they would come back out fishing once our trip was over. If I ever go offshore fishing again I hope the experience is better than this.