St Marks Saturday 6/19
Posted: June 20th, 2004, 1:58 pm
Although the take home catch was modest, forum member eat_mo_crawfish (aka Shaw) and I had a great day on the water yesterday. The day started out with a little setback as no live shrimp were to be found at either of our regular bait stops. However, after a shot of espresso and rounding up some fresh dead shrimp, we were ready to go. Hit the St Marks ramp about 7:45 and were on our way by 8am. The seas were great, it was just a ripple in the morning. Our first order of business was to hit a couple of spots in the East River. Shaw landed a rat red at our first stop to get any jinx off the boat, and then at our second stop floated a shrimp in the middle of the river under a popping cork to land a nice 17" trout while I flailed at the shoreline with plastics to no avail. OK, time to hit the flats. First set up a drift just a little east of the lighthouse in about 5-6' of water. No trout, but I got cut off by a spanish mackeral at the boat, still fishing plastic jigs. Then we hit some floating grass and hooked a few ladyfish. Most managed their own boatside release, to Shaw and I's relief. About 10:30 we decided to run a little ways to some patch bottom in deeper water (10-12'?). There the bite picked up. We made two drifts and picked up a large grunt (who was promptly halved and put out on flatlines), several short trout, a couple of small black sea bass, got into the ladyfish again, and Shaw put two more keeper trout and a small spanish in the cooler. Most of these were caught on red and pink jigheads tipped with fresh-dead shrimp. By the third drift the bite had laid off and the sun was making things hot. So a run to the bird rack was in order for lunch and a quick swim to cool off. The clouds were starting to build by then so we stayed close and hit one more spot, but no fish home at that spot. We did a little shallow water boatriding just looking around after that but the bay was starting to whitecap and thunder could be heard. Got back to the ramp and loaded up just in time for the rain. Although we saw a couple of manatees and sea turtles, no cobia, tarpon or sharks were spotted or hooked. Overall a good day and hopefully "Team Crawfish" will have another successful report soon.