St. Simons Island

Max with his Bonnethead

I took a long weekend and went to visit my good buddy Fishy (a.k.a. Scott Pastor) at his house on beautiful St. Simons Island, GA. He had been inviting me down forever and we could just never get together on our schedules so we finally made it happen – of course it had nothing to do with a great redfish & flounder report that he had recently relayed to me. Fishy has a very warm and beautiful family and this was the first time that I had spent any time with them. I drove down to Atlanta on Thursday evening after work in the 2004 F250 with the new Native Kayak strapped to the top and hooked up with Scott to stay in his home away from home. Fishy works in Oak Ridge a lot and so he uses their house in Atlanta as a midway stopping point to break up the travel to and from St. Simons. We enjoyed a nice local pizza pie with one of Fishy's long time friends, Jimmy Wayne Buckshot, and retired early so we could get a jump start on the remaining leg of the trip to St. Simons. We rolled in early the next day to beautiful St. Simons anxious to get out in the salt marsh. After meeting the family and getting settled in it was down to business, Fishy had received a nice new 100' seine net for his birthday that he was dying to try out so we headed for the beach. We rolled out the seine and made a broad sweeping pass out off the beach through the surf in hopes of limiting out on stone and blue crabs only to get a 5' black tip shark in the net. Once we started pulling the net into the shallows the shark went bananas and ripped a huge hole in the seine. Needless to say this ended the seining activities and Fishy was pissed.
One of things I learned while I was at St. Simons was the backwater tidal creek fishing is completely dictated by the tide. Therefore, we let the tide chart tell us when we would be fishing today – turns out we needed to enter the creek at about 3:00 p.m. at high tide. This allowed us a little bit of time to get bait. As with all live bait fishing, getting just the right bait can be an adventure of its own. The boys (Max & Grady) had the bait routine down to an art. They knew the process and were glad to show a newby like me the ropes. We set out minnow traps baited with pieces of hot dog at low tide in the headwaters of the creek we would later fish. This required stomping through the classic nutrient rich charcoal grey stinky salt marsh mud that is so distinctly and uniquely found at the coast. After setting the traps we headed back to the house to rig up our rods and to load kayaks – Max and Fishy would be fishing out of their own individual one man boats while Grady and I would be working out of my new Native. After just an hour or so we were ready and headed back to the tidal creek headwaters to collect the 3 or 4 dozen mud minnows (Umbra lima) that our traps had secured for us. Mud minnows are one of the baits of choice and as I learned quite appetizing if you get hungry along the float trip. Did I mention Fishy is crazy and will eat just about anything? We put our Kayaks in at high tide and began the ~2 mile trip to the ocean, riding the current of the outgoing tide. We fished a Carolina rigged live bait set up and allowed it to bounce along the bottom as we drifted, casting and hitting points and pockets in the sawgrass as we gently progressed along the creek. The creek was 4 to 8' deep in most places and not much more than 20 to 30' wide. We occasionally came to a place where there were some riffles with a deeper pool forming. I picked up a small rat red and a couple of speckled trout along the way. As we floated we could sneak up on the marsh birds and get a really good look at them. We saw a bunch of rails and marsh wrens. About a mile and a half into our float trip we came upon some docks and deeper water and then something big sucked down Grady's mud minnow. It was on…his rod doubled, his drag sang, and his eyes got about as big as golf balls, and all I was worried about was keeping the kayak backed away from the dock and that fish off of the barnacle covered pylons. I'll have to hand it the little man, Grady (now known as Spot Tail) did a terrific job of fighting the "fish of the trip" an 8 lb redfish. He was thrilled to say the least. Fishy caught a few specks and then caught a couple of nice keeper flounder once we got out into the actual ocean where the creek dumps out. Overall, we caught 7 or 8 fish – it was a lot of fun.
The next day we went out in the ocean in Fishy's Carolina Skiff. We attempted to locate some more flounder and redfish, but weren't able to catch any. We saw some redfish tailing in the shallows, but could never invoke a bite. We did catch a few sharks – Max caught the big one of the day, a 3' bonnet head shark.