The 45-foot ledge glowing from the video depth recorder of the Florida Fisherman II partyboat had me confused. Could it be that the captain had lost his way and ended up somewhere other than the Middle Grounds? After all, this was supposed to be the Gulf of Mexico--a body of water known more for its flat bottom and gradual slope than for the red and yellow Grand Canyon I was looking at. Perhaps during my 6-hour sleep out of Hubbard's Marina at Johns Pass the captain had instead steered us to Florida's east coast through the Okeechobee Waterway and I was now somewhere in the Bahamas.

But after shaking off the 4 a.m. grog, I realized that we were anchoring over one of the hundreds of breaks that have made the Florida Middle Grounds the destination for overnight trips for decades.

Atop the underwater cliff on the screen of the depth recorder was an immense yellow blizzard, studded with red--a pixel clue to the fish below awaiting the baited hooks of some 50 anglers on board. The break had created a rising current in the water column, attracting all sorts of baitfish and the predators that follow.

"See that cloud suspended above the break?" said Capt. Mike McDermott, a second generation Hubbard captain, as he spun the wheel and backed down for precise positioning of the boat. "Those are fish--grouper, snapper and amberjack. This is a (loran) number my dad passed on to me--I can always count on that cloud to be there."

The aisles in the bunkhouse came alive with yawning and stretching anglers as they broke out of their racks to sit on their coolers while they laced on shoes or dug through gear bags for the right sweatshirt to match the morning chill.

Hooks were baited and rods extended into the darkness for the gunnel warfare that was about to begin.

Sometime between that predawn anchoring and the final anchor-pull at 10 that night, three very busy mates--their bruised and weathered fingers wrapped in protective tape--stringered, tagged and iced 2,500 pounds of mangrove snapper, grouper and amberjack. It was a fish fest that made me a partyboat believer.

Hubbard's Marina has been chartering overnight trips to the Middle Grounds since 1969 when Capt. Wilson Hubbard first heard rumors of big and plenty far out to the left of Florida.

"My dad was hearing reports about walls of fish from the commercial boats that regularly fished the Middle Grounds," explains Capt. Jeff Hubbard, who started working the overnighter trips when he was 17. "We were running night trips out 20 to 30 miles, so a 2-nighter to the Middle Grounds was a natural--twice the distance, twice the time."

Hubbard says the original 90-foot mono-hull Florida Fisherman was the first "sleeper boat" out of Pinellas County, and at the time, the premier partyboat on the west coast, making the 9-knot run during the first night, fishing all day and returning the next night.

"I remember Mom clipping articles out of the newspaper. Most of the other partyboats were wooden and slower--ours was steel and the darling of the partyboat fleet, so it got a lot of publicity."

What used to be a 10-hour run on the original Florida Fisherman is now seven hours on the Florida Fisherman II, a 75-foot aluminum catamaran that does 13 knots and extends fishing time by six hours, not to mention the heightened comfort factor of fishing from and sleeping on a cat-hull platform.

"I tell all my customers it's just like camping out," says Hubbard. "If you plan it like a camping trip--cooler, sleeping bag, change of clothes and such--you'll have everything you need."

For far-out grouper digging, the 50 miles out of Bayport or 70 miles out of Johns Pass to the southern end of the Florida Middle Grounds is a couple hour's run in a Scarab-type fishing boat on a calm summer day, and Capt. Mike reports seeing more and more of those types of Middle Grounds fishermen. "I counted 50 boats during a dive tournament last year," says Capt. Mike.