Don't tie up! Chunk, chum and jig. Bring a small sea anchor to control your drift or drift control rig to keep you into the waves for comfort(if it's 3 foot or better you will be happy you have it). When you call it a night of jigging, put down a squid with a glow stick about 200 feet down on a 50 or 30... use 15-20 feet of 200 pound leader. Use 2 pounds of lead on a 3 way swivel and put the glow stick with the weights. If you have time to get a LP light, get one of the tri-color ones and put another bait down at 500 to 800 feet. A glow stick will blow up that deep so don't try using one.
If can find a buoy to tie off on and decide to and someone else comes up to you and wants to tie off to you, be thankful for the offer and say Sure! Having another boat behind you will make the night much better and smoother for you. Offer them a line and don't accept theirs because if they want or need to untie from you, they can't. If you offer them a line, tell them they can tie off to it and leave when they want leaving your line in the water (if they leave before you do).
Be sure to bring a cast net with you!!!! Lots of interesting creatures show up at night and a 6 foot cast net can easily catch squid, flyers, triple tails, baby sea turtles and so on.
If you have not been out at night before, there is no horizon out in the gulf! If you are prone to motion sickness, a night in the gulf will get you for sure! Put on a patch or take something!
Before you leave, take the night shift hours and divide them by the number onboard. For example, say you guys plan on calling it a night at 2:00am and plan on resuming fishing at 6:00am and have 4 people onboard. You have 4 hours of downtime and 4 onboard so you have 4 night watch shifts. Put each shift in a hat (in this case, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5 and 5-6) and you draw the hours you are on watch. While on watch, you keep tabs on crew (if someone get up to smoke a cig or take a pee off the side of the boat, you make sure they return to sleeping), you keep an eye out for weather looking for lightning, keeping an eye on the radar and monitoring the VHF for weather alerts. You keep an ear our for distress calls on the radio. You monitor the boat, are bilge pumps pumping like they usually do, it the genset running (if installed), is the pork tenderloin on the green egg ready to turn (that's tomorrow's lunch BTW).
Good luck and be save!!!
