That's guide-speak for spending a long day on the water looking for fish that should be there, but they're not.
Fortunately, that applied to only the third of the three days I spent down in Jax fishing with Capt. Curt Toomer. I had planned the trip months prior around the new moon. The up side was that it was supposed to be a period of high activity. Of course, the factor you can't plan is the weather.
Well, the weather gods smiled on us. Sunny skies, highs in the high 70s, a bit breezy on Saturday, but otherwise excellent conditions. The first two days we spent hitting creeks off the intracoastal waterway in Curt's skiff. Friday was spent mostly exploratory, fishing creeks that we had never visited. Consequently, the catching was a bit slow, but we managed over 15 Speckled Trout, many in the 15-17 inch range.
Saturday was a catching spree. Curt put us on his go-to spots. Over 20 Trout, a bunch of under slot Reds, a keeper Black Drum, and a Flounder to round out a North Florida Slam. Also a bunch of Mangrove Snapper, with a few in the keeper range. Fished with live shrimp, and Salt Strong 2.0 paddle tails in Mud Minnow color. The first time using this particular color, and it did not disappoint, as it managed to keep up with the live bait on the trout.
Fortunately, we'd enjoyed enough catching to make day 3 enjoyable, even if we didn't land many fish (actually, only 2). We fished with Capt. Matt Chipperfield. While Matt targets multiple species, one of his fortes is targeting Redfish in the grass flats during flood tides. In the fall, tides surge above normal levels, pushing water well up into the grasses. The bait follow the water, and theoretically the Reds as well.
You're only fishing water that's 1-2 feet deep, in the grass, looking for tailing Reds. Matt prefers flyrods throwing crab patterns. Since there's grass all around, you throw the fly away from the Red, drag the fly close, and play with the line to make the fly jiggle and attract the Red.
We had great conditions, a sold flood tide, and plenty of bait in the grass. Unfortunately, the Reds did not show up. That's the down side of this kind of fishing; there's really no Plan B. So after about 3 hours, and having spooked only one Red, Matt decided to call it a morning. But he suggested we meet again in the afternoon and hit a couple of creeks off the intracoastal at low tide.
We met up again at 3:30, and Matt motored his skiff south to hit the first creek. The tide had been going out for quite some time. You know the water is getting skinny when the boat is sitting below the bank, and you can barely see above the grass. Curt boated a keeper Trout not far up in the creek. But that was it. So Matt decided to leave the creek and hit one more while we had daylight.
As we moved up the second creek Matt went from the motor to poling. Again, really fishy water. Around 4:45 we made our way up to the spot where we could see Reds moving around. I managed one fish close to the slot on the mud minnow paddle tail. We poled around what was essentially a big mud puddle, casting to Reds in what had to be less than 2 feet of water. Unfortunately, the time we had spent at the first creek limited the time in the hole.
As Matt said, and every angler has experienced, sometimes you're just grinding. Matt knew his stuff, and was an excellent teacher. But as the old saying goes, when the fish aren't there, they're somewhere else. 😂
Yeah, it might be grinding, but it's still fishing.
Tight Lines,
Mikey D Fishing
No comments:
Post a Comment