Friday after work I loaded up the boat and headed down to the coast to stay at a buddy’s beach house. After staying up pretty late drinking bluegills, 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning came pretty quick. Jon Boat and I launched and rode to spot #1 in darkness. Seeing as how the depth recorder isn’t working on my boat, we eased in to the area we wanted to fish and did the whole “use the rod as our depth recorder” thing. I dropped the trolling motor and eased towards some structure and made my first cast. On the fourth twitch, the plug went off and I hooked up with something. I thought it might be a catfish and so I told him we didn’t need to net the thing…it was still too dark to see, but when we got it up to the boat it looked to be a decent trout. Wader ended up netting it and then said to me, “Damn that’s a big trout”. Threw it on the Golden Rule and she went 26.5”. Not a bad start.
We continue working our way to shore throwing topwater plugs with mullet jumping everywhere and Wade sticks a couple good, upper-slot fish that go in the box. We also had a few reds blowup on the plugs, but none that stuck. We decide to move about a mile down to some spotty looking bottom in two feet of water. After five casts, Wade asks, “Dude, are you sure there’s fish here?” Three twitches later and a bomb goes off on my plug and I hook up. Wade casts his plug out, makes a couple twitches and his explodes. To quote Sir Mix-A-Lot, “Umph, double up, Umph Umph.” We get both the fish in and they’re perfect tournament reds – over 26” and fat. We continue fishing and catch a handful of nice reds.
At about 9:30, we saw some baitfish getting crushed by tarpon about 500 yards from where we were. I put the trolling motor on high and headed that way. We get to where we’d seen them last and a huge wake pops up within casting distance off the bow of the boat. I sling the spook out and the wake turns toward my spook…twitch twitch twitch twitch. The wake stops at my plug, there’s about a 2 second pause and then boom goes the dynamite. The fish immediately rips off about 50 yards of drag and so we decide to chase with the boat. I fight the fish for about 10 minutes, but it’s staying down deep. I’m not an expert, but I’m beginning to think a tarpon would’ve jumped by now. A few more minutes and I catch a glimpse of a huge jack. I fight it for probably twenty minutes and then give it a little CPR.
After we get the Jack back in the water, Wade works his Bite-a-Bait past a wake and his plug gets crushed. The fish immediately rips off 50 or 60 yards of line, but stays on the surface…we get a visual of a tarpon right as his line breaks. We stayed in the area and caught a few more big Jacks, but got no more love from “LDS”.
Around 11 a.m. the sky started looking a little sketchy and so we pulled up the radar on the Crackberry and it wasn’t looking good. We decided to head back in it turned out to be a good decision as we made it in to the ramp in the nick of time...a nice little Saturday of fishing.
Sunday 7/26
July Team Seatrout: BB and I fished several of the same areas, but the conditions were almost completely opposite from the day before. We caught some trout and a couple good reds and came in 3rd with a little under 9 lbs. Jay and I had fun and will be back in August to do it again.
We caught all our fish shallow on Super Spooks and flukes over spotty bottom. Water temps stayed between 78-82 both days.
