The Early Days - Redfish #1

Here's an old picture I found of me with my first redfish! Not quite a slot red, but it was great start.  I caught it off a pier at Cedar Key, Florida - It was probably 1973 - 1974.  I also threw in a  shot of me with a blue crab.  We used to love crabbing off the piers with hoop nets.

Destin Redfish-O-Rama: Day One

Fueling Up @ Dreamland on the Way to Dreamland!

 

One of several triples during the day



 

A Typical Bay Bruiser

Think of one of the most exhilirating experiences of your life...  All of us could probably generate a mental list of the top five to ten events of our lives.  For you, this may include your wedding day, the birth of a child, winning the lottery, being the first man to step on the moon (if you happen to be Neil Armstrong).  Well I'm about to take you on a journey down to Destin, Florida that ranks right up there with Apollo 11.  On last Thursday I headed south with two of the craziest fishing partners I have ever had the pleasure to accompany in a ocean vessel.  The lunar launch began at about 3:00 p.m. on Thursday after work when I met up with two great friends - Charlie Shields and Stuart Row.  Stuart, Charlie and I have been planning this trip now for about 2 months and have been looking forward to it with great eagerness.  As a matter of fact, from about 72 hours out Charlie was providing me and Stuart with periodic countdown departure time reports via text message.   Every time I go on a trip like this, the level of anticipation and expectation grows to almost incomprehensible heights in the days immediately preceeding departure date - so much so that the 9 hour drive to Florida is indistinguishable from when I was just a kid and Dad would take my brother Scott and me to the panhandle every spring to bass fish.  Two things matter most on trips like this...fishing & food!  So the first pit stop on the trip down centered around locating some top shelf bar-b-que with plenty of local ambiance - Dreamland in Birmingham!  This was my first time to Dreamland, and how appropriate since I was on my way to my own personal dreamland...Destin.  The restrauant had a great atmosphere with an a good SEC decor and a heavy leaning towards Bear Bryant and Alabama. This particular Dreamland sat right in the heart of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) campus.  We all thoroughly enjoyed the ribs, and pulled pork bar-b-que, and topped it all off with a healthy helping of banana pudding.  The intensity of the abdominal pain and outward pressure on my lower rib cage was directly proportional to the outstanding quality of the food at Dreamland.  After stuffing ourselves, the journey returned to I-65 South and thanks to Charlie's glorious shortcut to Andalusia we rolled into Destin about 11:30 p.m.  Along the way down, Stuart got a call from our guide Daniel Pike, owner of Inshore Angler Charters (http://www.inshoreanglercharters.com/home.php) who wanted to delay our departure time by a couple of hours because of forecasted high winds early in the morning.  We met Capt. Dan on Friday morning at about 8:45 a.m. along fisherman's wharf to begin the days adventure in a 24' Blazer Bay powered by a four stroke 225 Yamaha .  The weather could not have been any better if we had ordered it, beautiful blue sunny skies with a high in the low 80s.  We started off catching our bait, atlantic croakers (Micropogonias undulatus) using dual hook rigs baited with cut squid in Marler bayou.  In about 45 minutes we had about 30 croakers and were ready to get serious.  Our first spot was at the Destin bridge about three pylons to the east of the main channel, and we moved around anchoring the boat so that we could fish the various pylons of the bridge.  The most productive spot turned out to be one section to the east of the main passage way or as Charlie so fondly referred to it..."the left metal".  This hole produced a good number of high end slot reds, and a few over.  Capt. Dan also shared his secret deep hole with us which was west of the main passageway and further north just off Crab Island.  This hole also produced a good number of redfish, most of which were larger on average.  Capt. Dan said this is where he had caught most of his 40+ pound redfish, so we were more than glad to give it a fair shake.  Although it didn't cough up any 40 pounders it did produce more 8 to 15 pounders than these three good ole boys from East Tennessee ever dream of seeing.  The fishing day ended around 3:00 p.m. with us taking our fattest three 27"redfish to the 2010 Destin Rodeo for the weigh-in.  The rodeo rules require that all fish be gutted and then weighed,  our best redfish of the day was 7 pounds even which was good enough to take 1st place in the Bonus Awards Division (i.e. the big money division!).  Last year's winning redfish was 7.4 lbs, and this year the 1st place redfish in this divsion at the end of the month with take home $6000! So we were pretty good about our chances of at least placing one of the top three money spots.  Overall we wound up catching over 30 redfish all between 7 and 15 pounds.  It was one of the most amazing days of fishing I have ever experienced. 

 

Me, Miss Destin and our 1st Place Redfish



Redfish Sketch

Here's a sketch I did of a redfish. When I'm not fishing, I'm usually thinking about fishing :)

Can We Make It 3 in a Row?

Luke and I returned again this morning at 6:00 a..m. (1st sunlight) to fish the saltmarsh shallows for reds and specks in the Native kayak.  We did not do as good as the previous days - we caught a total of 10 trout and 4 redfish.  Luke pretty much smoked me catching all the keeper fish (4 trout and 1 red).  We had a great time though.

More Redfish & Speck Madness

Luke and I went to the same spot as the yesterday where I cashed in on the monster redfish bonaza (behind conch Island off Hwy 30A) and fished from the kayak.  We started with chug-bugs and zara spooks and located a spot with lots of bait fish activity and a school of mullet - lots of good surface activity.  Right away Luke hooked into a monster speckled trout and fought it all the way to the boat and it got off.  I estimate it was between 6 and 7 lbs - just the biggest speck I've ever laid eyes on. We were sick.  As the day progressed we caught a few more smaller trout and moved around looking for the reds.  I caught a keeper redfish (~3 lbs) on a zara spook but things were somewhat slow for an hour or so until we returned to the main channel section immediately behind Conch Island - still in about 2' of water.  We began picking up a few fish, and then it began...2 hours of the most exciting fishing of my life!  Over the course of about 2 hours we caught 25 reds and trout with the best being an 8 lb redfish.  Luke redeemed his earlier heartbreak by boating a 5 lb gator trout.  The biggest trout any of us have ever boated. It was a completely incredible day - probably the best day of my life, and I got to share it with my son...Wow!

Redfishin' St. Joe Bay in the Native

At sun up (~6:00 a.m.) I entered St. Joseph Bay in Port St. Joe, FL behind Conch Island and fished the very shallow (~2') marsh grass in my Native Kayak. At ~8:00 I caught a 27" (~8 lb) redfish on a weightless rigged Gulp natural colored shrimp. I then found a spot at ~9:00 a.m. (low tide was at 9:13 a.m.) where there appeared to be some flow through a necked down portion of grass. I noticed mullet, baitfish and feeding fish. I threw a chug-bug near the bait fish and a monster redfish blew up on it. As I was fighting the fish he was pulling my kayak into the spot and since i didn't want to spook the fish I began grabbing grass with one had and holding the rod with the other, and consequently I lost the fish. The very net cast the exact same thing happened - another bruiser lost! Then I stuck my paddle into the soft mucky bottom and tied off to it. The third cast... a monster crushed the chug-bug again. His initial run squealed off 30 to 40 yards of Power Pro, but I fought him back for the next 5 minutes and got him all the way to the boat. I got a great look at the fish - I estimate he weighed between 15 - 20 lbs. The largest redfish I had ever seen. As he was about 10 feet from the boat he got off. UGH! The very next cast I hooked another nice red and brought him all the way to the boat only to lose him as well. I was absolutely dying at this point. I've never had so much adrenaline running through my veins. I realized that since I was so low to the water that my angle of fight must have been bad and got worse the closer I got the fish to the kayak. I realized I needed to stand up, but to keep from spooking the fish I had to stay crouched down behind the marsh grass. At this point I realized I needed my Mossy Oak Marsh Grass camo pattern. The next cast I boated a really nice keeper redfish (~4 lbs). For the next 1&1/2 hours every cast was either a monster blow-up, hook and fight and lose, or boat a beautiful bruiser redfish. I caught ~20 redfish from 3 to 8 lbs, keeping two 27" fish. It was the most incredible 2 hours of fishing I have ever experienced!

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.