CSB 11-7
Posted: November 11th, 2009, 10:55 am
The wife and I had a trip planed to head down to CSB for the weekend. The weather forecast didn’t look good but I decided to bring the boat along anyways. On Saturday NOAA was calling for 15 to 20 knot winds out of the east. Since the bay runs north/south my plan was to run over to the gulf side of the cape and fish the beach. I had read that the Pompano were starting to run so I thought we would give it a try. Once we rounded the point we started to see some birds diving off in the distance. Decided to run on down and see if there were any fish under them. As we got closer to the birds we could see that the water was boiling with fish. My first thought was Spanish but as we arrived the water was red. We ended up in the middle of a school of big bull redfish. There must have been over a thousand of them. I had never seen a school of reds this big in my life not to mention so many of this size. As soon as our jigs hit the water we were hooked up. After a 20-30 min battle on 10lb class tackle we landed the first two fish of the day. The ruler on my boat goes up to 36 inches. These two fish exceed that by at least 6 inches. I have caught over a 1000 redfish in my life and these two were bigger than I have ever caught before. After letting those fish go we found the school again about a ¼ mile away and did it again but decide to switch to top water plugs and bigger rods. It was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Every cast you would have close to 20, 30lb reds going all out trying to catch our plugs. They almost looked like a school of dolphin breaching the water. At one point I had two reds on at the same time until one of them ripped off the hooks on my Top Dog.
This pattern continued for the next 3 ½ hours. Find the school, hook up on the first cast and then fight the fish for 20 min. Then do it all over again. Finding the school was never an issue either since their was always 50 birds over the top of them. In all the excitement I forgot to keep track of how many we caught but it was a lot. They wore us out! At the end the fish were still biting but out arms and tackle just couldn’t take any more. This was one if not the best Red fishing trips I have ever had.
This pattern continued for the next 3 ½ hours. Find the school, hook up on the first cast and then fight the fish for 20 min. Then do it all over again. Finding the school was never an issue either since their was always 50 birds over the top of them. In all the excitement I forgot to keep track of how many we caught but it was a lot. They wore us out! At the end the fish were still biting but out arms and tackle just couldn’t take any more. This was one if not the best Red fishing trips I have ever had.
