So I went out Tuesday afternoon (St. Marks)

[Ted in Tallahassee]

Being a state worker we had Tuesday off for "Hurricane leave." Very minor damage so it made no logical sense to me to sit at home twiddling the thumbs and wasting a day off by NOT going fishing.

Now on Sunday night & early Monday we had the "brunt" of Irma hit Tallahassee, data says 20-38 mph sustained north winds for a good many hours. I didn't think much about that until someone posted on Facebook a photo of the Fort's floating docks next to the ramps on Monday. I couldn't figure out what I was looking at at first. They were sitting on dry land! OK it looked like wet mud but you get the idea. That wind blew a LOT of water out into the bay. Talk about low tide. Beyond insane low. It was anti-storm-surge I guess.

So anyway when I left the Fort and got out there Tuesday to the oyster bars before you get to the Lighthouse (headed out at 1:15), the wind had freshened to a stiff 15-20 mph SW annoying blast which made it too rough to get out to the flats, so I hung out on the exposed oyster bars, anchoring the boat and walking up & down the bars casting, which has been my MO of late. The water was cool, and not as cloudy as I thought it would be. It wasn't a dirty-looking cloudiness, nor a tannin-tea-stained darkness, but more of a slight silty type of cloudiness, that looked kind of like a thin fog you would see in air.

I must have cast a Gulp-tipped jig 1000 times, trying different colors, and I also threw a Heddon One-Knocker in bone a few dozen times from a couple of different bars. In my four-plus hours of doing that, I landed exactly ONE fish--a short black drum. I didn't even catch a catfish! Mullet were there, pinfish were in full force trying to tear pieces off my Gulps (sometimes successfully), I saw gar and stingrays and birds but I did not catch ONE redfish, trout, ladyfish, BSB, or flounder. It was easy to cast, as long as it was in one direction--northeast. I swear I was casting 100 yards, what with that wind, a 1/4 oz jig, and a full spool of 20 lb. braid.

So getting to the main point of my post-- what I DID see is an unusual number of dead fish washing up on the oyster bars. LOTS of small porcupine (puffer) fish, a few pinfish, and a BIG trout. All healthy looking, and only just starting to turn (that is, did not pass the smell test). Probably had been there about a day. And then I think I understood what must have happened. When the wind blew all the water out to that insane low tide, the flats, and most of the creeks, must have been dry land too, just like at the Fort. I bet there were thousands of fish of all kinds and sized caught stranded out there, loaded up into depressions that still held some water, with some caught out in the open and suffocating on the dry flats. I bet the flats were exposed WAY out from the shoreline. It must have been a sight to see. That's what must have killed off all those fish. If there were that many dead fish on the oyster bars inside the river mouth a day later, I can only imagine how many floated out into the bay after the winds stopped and the water came back in and a couple of tides cycled. Sharks and birds must have feasted.

Man that sure would have been neat to have gone out there in an airboat and looked around. Probably could have limited out on every species of fish in 10 minutes. And it wasn't really THAT windy. I would have been game to go, if I had thought of it in advance and some other nut had asked me to go. Of course I would have filmed everything, just in case. Waterproof camera case and float tied to it. If it was found in Cuba a week later along with my shoe or something.

[eightwt]

Thanks for the post. Thought I'd wait another day or two to let it settle some more.

[Steve Stinson]

I thought there might be a fish kill associated with the extreme low tide when I saw Brett Shield's pictures from his marina. Those fish have been going to the same holes for ever at low tide and had no idea how bad it was going to be.