ECONFINA 3-24

Post by **dolphinatic** » March 25th, 2004, 1:46 am

This was by far one of the best days I have ever spent on the flats. I decided to take the day off and spend it with my dad and son...the son is out of school for Spring Break and dad is now retired. I spent this past Saturday at St. Marks, but today I had the entire day so we decided to hit the Econfina. My hats off to whoever made it happen to finally widen the road!!!! Anyhow, with a late morning low tide, we arrived at the ramp at 11:30.

We headed on out and went east. We stopped around 12:00 and immediately the bite was on. At 12:50 we had 5 keeper trout in the cooler and only 2 shorts (14.5" by the way). My dad caught the first 3 keepers using frozen shrimp under a CT. I caught the other 2 using a split tail green curly tail with a red jig head. They gave this jig a fit all day. The closer we stayed to the crab traps, the better the bite. We made 3 drifts throughout the day and caught fish consistently till 4:00. Later on in the afternoon, I decided to try this double jig setup consisting of 2 green grubs with 1/4 oz. orange lead heads. In 1/2 hour I caught 4 keeper trout and missed about as many. The spanish loved it too. I was catching them 2 at a time with it! At one point, even a HUGE trout followed 2 hooked spanish all the way to the boat before turning away! The trout also seemed to like a DOA shrimp under a CT. I threw a variety of grubs at them today and they seemed to like them all. The most popular were the electric chicken, green curly tail and a 4" green shrimp body with a orange head...all fished with a 3/8 oz. red jig head.

TOTAL FOR THE DAY: 18 TROUT (16-19") AND A HANDFUL OF VARIOUS SIZED SPANISH.

We ended up with 18 trout (3 over our limit) because my 9 year old was the one counting. He said he counted 15 but 3 more mysteriously appeared at the final count at home. Go figure. Luckily, we had the entire place to ourselves today and only saw one other boat on our way in.....and it wasn't the man! The conditions were perfect today.....light cool breeze, lots of sunshine and lots of action. I plan to do it all again on Saturday.

Post by **Chalk** » March 25th, 2004, 6:30 am

You're really making me want to be a bad boy and go dolphinatic.....Nice report....Not sure if I would have stated my violation (not that I haven't done it

) publicly

, can a forum post be used as evidence

....Glad you spent some quality time with your family..

Post by **RodBow** » March 25th, 2004, 7:24 am

dolphin, WTG your report is very encouraging!

dstockwell · Post by **dstockwell** » March 25th, 2004, 7:40 am

Very nice.. WTG..

Post by **dolphinatic** » March 25th, 2004, 8:06 am

violation??? How does anybody really know that we caught that many fish anyhow???

We did give our "excess" away to some folks who offered to clean 'em.....you know, to ease the conscience

.

Post by **CSMarine** » March 25th, 2004, 9:02 am

Great fishing. Sounds like a blast. I'll be headed to Keaton tomorrow night for two days.

Post by **Sir reel** » March 25th, 2004, 9:13 am

YA don't mean ta say that ANYONE on this forum would ever stretch tha truth or the trout or how many...woudcha

..??

Post by **Tidedancer** » March 25th, 2004, 9:31 am

I'm headed that way in the morning.

Post by **mattfsu7** » March 25th, 2004, 11:25 am

Very encouraging report. I can't wait for this weekend. I went out of Econfina last Saturday (3/20) and fished the entire time between the Aucilla and Econfina in less than 3 ft of water. We used green grubs under a CT and Top Dogs to fish topwater. We didn't totally slay the fish, but we left with a total of 3 keepers (probably caught a total of 20 fish) and one of them was 25" and just under 4lbs. We fished the crab traps also, but didn't really notice any difference in the number of bites.

Littoral · Post by **Littoral** » March 25th, 2004, 12:43 pm

dolphinatic, Nice report.
I'm interested, was there anything you tried that didn't work?

Post by **dolphinatic** » March 25th, 2004, 6:45 pm

I tried various topwater (chugbug, mirrorlure, yozuri) just for fun, and got no hits. I even tried a few live pinfish under a CT, but no luck there either. We found lots of pinfish in certain spots, but not all over. I caught some BIG trout last year with 'em and plan on doing it again real soon

Post by **mattfsu7** » March 26th, 2004, 10:19 am

Yeah, last year I did real well with pinfish also. I usually fished them under a CT. What surprized me was that while we were always looking for the smaller pinfish, we ended up using some almost the size of our hand and still caught trout. We even had a trout last year that tried to swallow a pinfish, but he couldn't fit all the way in the trout's mouth. We literally caught the trout because the pinfish spread his fins which caught in the trout's mouth.