Amazing! Ridiculous! Incredible! Sick! Off the Hook!
Pick your phrase for “the fishing is awesome”, but don’t spend too much time on it because you need to get your line in the water! The fishing is the best it’s been all year.
The water temp is up and the fish are the most active they’ve been. They are absolutely slamming the bait. No timidness, no reluctance – the fish are just going for it. There are bait balls all over the Intracoastal Waterway and large fish are tearing them up.
The Redfish, Black Drum and Yellow-mouth Trout bite is going crazy.
We dropped the boat in the water at Beach Marine around 6:40 AM Saturday morning. And thanks to a Yamaha 150 and 2 motivated anglers, our lines were wet at about 6:55 AM. The first Redfish was boated about 3 minutes later. Seriously! My first cast produced a Redfish … my second cast produced a Black Drum … and that’s pretty much how the day went.
We were fishing the water column with both live shrimp and fresh dead shrimp. We had planned on fishing some other baits as well, but honestly did not have time to think about it once we were in the action. I mean when it’s working, it’s working … and it was definitely working!
Fishing the tides
When our day started the tide had already turned and started to go out. We fished it all the way through the slack tide and the turn … amazingly we never stopped catching fish!
Yeah, it was like that. I’m not saying they were all keepers or anything. In fact, most of the redfish were in the 17” range, but they were all very healthy fish that put up an awesome fight.
The Last Cast
The last cast of the day pretty much illustrates the kind of action that is indicative of the fishing right now. It went like this: Tom hooked up with a fish (a 23” Redfish to be exact). So I grab the net with my right hand, holding my rod with my left. At the point which I am getting ready to net the Redfish (who was still a little green and decided to make another run) when I get a bite. I set the hook with my left hand, meanwhile netting the Redfish with my right. Once the Redfish was in the boat, I was able to engage with my reel and bring in a 17” + Black Drum. That’s when we realized it was 11:45 and we had promised to be in. So as hard as it was not to make one more cast, we packed it in and headed back to the boat ramp.
The Final Count
The total fish count was 15+ Redfish, 25+ Black Drum and a ½ dozen or so Yellow Mouth Trout.
