2009.09.05 St Marks - The Tincan Approach
Posted: September 5th, 2009, 7:24 pm
Headed out at sunrise today with the Mojo from the lighthouse to try and catch some red tail on the end of the outgoing. There was again a little more water than we expected when we got out there, so we laid up shallow in the northern cluster-whatnot of rocks around palmetto island. We spooked up a school of reds on the way in but the wind and current were working against us and we couldn't get a good drift on them; never saw em again. We ran real small drifts in about 12 inches of warm water with rocks all over the place waiting for the water to go out, and next thing we knew it was low tide, still quite a bit of water left.
We had small trout and pinfish topwater bite on all day. Not many hookups early. We did get some nice rolls and boils and a couple straight up explosions from obvious redfish, but couldn't get in to a good school, and for some reason today, most of the fish hitting just weren't getting in to any hooks. The water was a pretty good depth and there were bait pods everywhere. For the second week in a row we decided to exercise the Tincan approach; "wait em out" (I also refrained from shaving for a couple days to look the part) We finally started hooking up in to some trout, and went to work weeding out the weaklings. Mojo got a nice fat 19 incher and 10-15 minutes later I think, I hooked in to a nice one that I thought was a red from the wake it made when it hit; turned out to be a nice fat trout a little over 24" which seemed pretty big until I saw ab7bear's late report a few minutes ago.
An hour or two after the tide turned it really started ripping in; it got a little too deep and too tough to manage with all the rocks around, so we ended up taking the back door through Stoney Bayou and got the heck out around 2. We had 2.5mph on the GPS and 10mph on the speedometer at one point coming out of Stoney against the tide; it wasn't playin around. Overall it was an odd day with the bite being on most of the day and very aggressive, but extremely low number of hookups, especially odd the number of large fish that hit without hooking up; I know lots of the other ones were micro-trout and baitfish. Mojo and I did set a team record with about a baker's dozen pinfish on 4 inch and larger topwater lures. All said and done, the Tincan wait-em-out method resulted in one nice trout and 6-7 keepers total, plus about as many shorts, a couple pink dookie fish and 2 sharks. Mojo was throwing another bone Azuma Z-Dog and I caught the over slot fish on a chart Zara Spook. All the keepers came on those except I think I got one on a mullet colored She Dog. Water temp was dang it's hot and we fished in 9-15 inches of water all day.
This was the first keeper
This was my first fish - not a keeper but if you don't photograph your first fish of the day you tempt karma in to not giving you another opportunity
'nother of the keepers
This was the big-un of the day
and I think this was the last keeper before the tide exceeded 5mph
We had small trout and pinfish topwater bite on all day. Not many hookups early. We did get some nice rolls and boils and a couple straight up explosions from obvious redfish, but couldn't get in to a good school, and for some reason today, most of the fish hitting just weren't getting in to any hooks. The water was a pretty good depth and there were bait pods everywhere. For the second week in a row we decided to exercise the Tincan approach; "wait em out" (I also refrained from shaving for a couple days to look the part) We finally started hooking up in to some trout, and went to work weeding out the weaklings. Mojo got a nice fat 19 incher and 10-15 minutes later I think, I hooked in to a nice one that I thought was a red from the wake it made when it hit; turned out to be a nice fat trout a little over 24" which seemed pretty big until I saw ab7bear's late report a few minutes ago.
An hour or two after the tide turned it really started ripping in; it got a little too deep and too tough to manage with all the rocks around, so we ended up taking the back door through Stoney Bayou and got the heck out around 2. We had 2.5mph on the GPS and 10mph on the speedometer at one point coming out of Stoney against the tide; it wasn't playin around. Overall it was an odd day with the bite being on most of the day and very aggressive, but extremely low number of hookups, especially odd the number of large fish that hit without hooking up; I know lots of the other ones were micro-trout and baitfish. Mojo and I did set a team record with about a baker's dozen pinfish on 4 inch and larger topwater lures. All said and done, the Tincan wait-em-out method resulted in one nice trout and 6-7 keepers total, plus about as many shorts, a couple pink dookie fish and 2 sharks. Mojo was throwing another bone Azuma Z-Dog and I caught the over slot fish on a chart Zara Spook. All the keepers came on those except I think I got one on a mullet colored She Dog. Water temp was dang it's hot and we fished in 9-15 inches of water all day.
This was the first keeper
This was my first fish - not a keeper but if you don't photograph your first fish of the day you tempt karma in to not giving you another opportunity
'nother of the keepers
This was the big-un of the day
and I think this was the last keeper before the tide exceeded 5mph
