Fish Catching Travel
After a fairly long absence from any saltwater fishing I was finally able to get to POC with the Shoedog. The forecast was for light winds and low tide first thing, and that was accurate. What was surprising was how low the tide was, and when you combined that with no wind and no water movement, the fishing started off really slow.
Since it had been awhile we decided to hit our favorite trout bank in Big Bayou. Before we finally left the Bayou area at noon, we had only put 2 reds and one trout in the boat, all small. So with the water still not running we headed to the Oil Cut. It turned out to be a good choice.
Shoedog’s first keeper trout, and it was a hoss.
I couldn’t decide which picture was better, so here is the same fish.
The Oil Cut was pretty off color, but it had the one thing we had not seen the other places we fished, bait. Mullet and lots of them. Shoedog was throwing a pink Tsunami jerk minnow, and as far as the better bites, it was the color. I was throwing a sexy shad colored paddle tail, and though I caught some trout and a couple of reds, I could not put a keeper to the boat. There was one thing I didn’t have trouble getting to the boat. black drum.
The first one, then another, and then I lost a third one.
It was cool as I saw several of the drum roll over and eat it, always awesome. And boy do they pull good. I started catching them when I changed from a lighter jig head to a 1/4 and fished it with a Berkley 4″ purple Grass Pig, which has a paddle tail. I was able to fish more aggressively, but even with that bait I still lost another keeper trout. We were just sliding down the bank with the wind and throwing the bait almost on the bank. As the afternoon went on they started to whack the snot out of it, most of them on the first pull or two.
I wondered when I left the house if it wasn’t going to be like that, dead in the morning, then biting better as the tide came back. It turned out to be the case. You could have definitely waited until noon, and then just hit the bite. Before it was over Shoedog put 3 nice trout in the box, I contributed nothing. We caught maybe a dozen, with both of us losing a couple of nice fish. Redfish were a little harder to come by, and though we caught 5 or 6 of them, none made the dinner invitation.
So it turned out to be a fairly good day. We caught fish, and as usual, learned something. It really was a day to sleep in, take your time, and then hit it. Our timing was right, and it went from pretty slow to biting right along. If we had put what we should have in the boat it would have been pretty impressive for average trout size.
Now we are looking at the weather, and seeing it with winds to 30 mph tomorrow. So where we will fish tomorrow is highly up in the air. Guess it will be up early, check the wind, and go from there. Hopefully it will be back to the Oil Cut, there are some nice trout in there. Bait was clearly the key, and when we were catching them the bait was very active.
Check in tomorrow, lets see what happens, there should be a report from somewhere. And good luck to Jonathon, the young man I fished with from Corpus, he is in Louisiana the next 3 days fishing a College Tournament Trail bass tournament. Maybe he can whack a couple of good ones. And Jeffish sent me a copy of the work he did on some business cards for fishcatchingtravel.com. They look great, hell, it almost feels like this is a business. Thanks for reading my stuff.
Good Luck and Tight Lines
