Talking to the wife at the office around 4:00 and she says we should take the boat out after work. Ummm...OK! So I cut out right around 5, came home and changed clothes and picked up the wife and headed out to get the boat from JBT. We went to the lighthouse and didn't get the boat in the water until about 6:30 with the after work traffic. I've been out three times in the last week and the floating grass has been about as thick as I've ever seen it. When we got out there we were pretty close to a pretty flood tide, and we were out more for a sunset cruise to get out the house than for fishing, so we decided to just drift around for some trout. There was a boat pretty near where I'd planned to drift so we detoured about a mile away from them. Stop number one was loaded with grass and wasn't really clicking in about 10 minutes, sun's going down, so we move. Second stop the water was still 90 degrees and we pushed up toward shore trying to find cooler water. Coolest we got to was 88 degrees, drifted aimlessly in the SW wind so we were slooowly going toward shore. Once we got to the shallow (about 1 foot which was over a sandbar / marsh on the GPS that's often completely dry land) 88 degree water the bite heated up a little bit, wife caught a monster pinfish on a jig, but still not great action, and we started drifting more west to east. Out the corner of my eye I caught some action around the grass that I was saying I thought looked like reds. As soon as we got close enough I slung a surface walker as far as I could and landed a couple feet out from the grass. By about the third twitch of it I had a major crash and the fight was on. It turned out to be a redfish just under 27 inches that fought way above his weight class. I was able to land it after about a 2-3 minute fight, during the first half of which the fish gained more ground on me than I did on him. Once again the wife got all the other lines and poles out of the way, got the motor out of the water and netted like a pro. This is why we're married...well and the trip was her idea.
Couple of pics from last saturday, me and Mojo went out to fish the sunrise before the good football games. Driving east toward Aucilla from the St Marks channel (pretty much directly in to the sunrise which was right on the horizon at the time) about 1-1.5 miles off shore, pretty much the east flats superhighway where everyone with a Florida-sized boat runs, we NAILED something. It turned out to be the trunk of a palm tree, roughly 20 foot in length, that went all maverick adrift after last week's flooding. No possible way we could have seen it in a breezy chop and facing the sun, but we went ahead and did the nice thing and spent 3 of our 4 hours towing it up to shore and wrasslin it up in to the grass out of everybody's way. We was afeared one of them d-bags that lets their kids ride the bow with no life jacket might hit it or something, or that one of y'all fellers might damage your boat.
We got a direct hit on it at 42mph - boat went flyin out the water, obscenities went flyin from our mouths. I had a little bruising on my upper legs from slamming the console that didn't show up until a day or two later, but other than that, no damage to us and no damage to the boat that we could find once we got it out of the water. Porter Rock Guard - get you one! Also a reminder that after all that flooding there's bound to be some trees in the weirdest places.
