My son and I arrived at the light house pool yesterday morning about 8am. Low tide was approaching and water was pretty skinny. There was a lot of mud showing along the canal,
but we hustled and got out with no problem.
Conditions were very nice and we decided to head out for a while until some water came back in to the flats. We didn’t stop to catch bait and headed South. We fished in 30ft, 26ft, 20ft with frozen cut mullet, squid and shrimp. Caught several small bottom dwellers and two nice trigger fish but nothing to get excited about. My son had something pretty nice on (he had been free lining) and was doing a good job of working in to the boat on tackle that was probably too light but got cut off before we could see what it was.
With my 19ft Carolina Skiff, I spend more time on the flats than farther out and my inventory of GPS#’s for offshore isn’t very dependable.
We did hit Dog Ballard and a couple of places farther out. About noon we headed back in and set up a drift just east of the bird rack. Between 1:30-5:30 we caught a lot of shorts, cats, one small shark, and boated 3 keepers 16, 17, and 18 inches.
We lost at least 3 or 4 more close to the boat that would have been keepers. When the bite was on, the action was good but again mostly short. At one point, I caught 3 trout (shorts) on 4 casts.
On the flats, we fished primarily with CT’s. I used a chartreuse grub(sea shad) with a white jig head and my son used a red jig with a natural shrimp grub with sparkles in it. The wind started picking up around 2:30 and although it never got bad enough to be a problem , it did get a bit rough compared to earlier conditions. The water was clearer than I expected from the reports I’ve been hearing. I would say, where we were, offshore the visibility was probably 8-10 feet and there were some weed lines and some floating grass. In shore around the bird rack we could see the bottom in 5-6 foot. As to depth, where we caught trout, it didn’t seem to matter. We caught them in 7-8 ft and 4-5 ft. I don’t have a report on the stomach contents because it was late and dark when we finished cleaning up the boat and gear and I didn’t take the time to check. I will say however, that all the trout we caught were fatter and appeared to be better fed that when I last went out which was probably 6 weeks ago (much to long!!)
"Good Judgement" comes from experience, ... and a lot of that..... results from "Bad Judgement".
