It was another day where finding water was harder than finding fish with a negative low tide smack in the middle of the day, and once again I was concentrating slightly more on the new used boat than the fishing, but it did pretty well today so I was able to spend a few hours actually going after fish.
I spent the first hour or so running around both sides of the channel south of the bird rack looking for something good on the bottom in water deeper than 3 feet. I finally found an area of 5-7 and threw topwater for a while, netting more ladyfish and nothing else special. There was quite a bit of VHF chatter about catching spanish macks and inability to find trout.
I decided to move around slowly and look for some bottom structure, and thought what the hey, chucked out a gold spoon and trolled it while I drove around. I got over some decent looking bottom and depth for a good mile or so and decided to turn around and start a drift over it.
The second I put the motor in idle, the pole with the spoon bent about as far over as it could go and the line was flyin out of it. I picked it up and yanked - second or two later, very nice kingfish jumped up. Gave me one heck of a fight for about 45 seconds, then returned my spoon to me in near mint condition with no fish on it. Bummer.
After that I ran a few drifts, didn't get much of anything at first, but once the tide started to turn, I got into a 12" fish extravaganza. I had non-stop action again for about 2 hours; smallest fish - 12"...biggest fish - 13" I'm starting to think I may indeed be the king of the foot-long. In all I had about 10 trout make it to the boat and a couple small spanish macks. No good catches today, but the boat didn't break or run out of gas so I was happy.
This one didn't even bite the hook...
...and I'm not as good at self portraits as some of these other fellas.
