Dodging The Manatee

The beautiful days just keep coming! Today I met Greg and Myrna Gray down at the City marina and we made a quick hop over to the Bell River to fish some exposed oysters on the last of an incoming tide. Greg was on the bow tossing a fly rod while Myrna was at the stern pitching a jig and live shrimp. Both were making excellent casts but it took us a while to hookup. Myrna had a couple of good bites on the shrimp then she had a strange one and when she reeled it in we saw that it was a feisty Flounder. When the tide hit bottom
we ran around to Tiger Island and fished the logs. Myrna reeled in a hungry Black "puppy" Drum and Greg battled a Redfish that was right at Slot size. But the bite was somewhat slow, even though the conditions were perfect, so we ran around to the Jolley River and fished the "bank".  There was all kinds of movement along the bank and even though we had bites, we had no takers. We did see a  huge Gar fish swim right up to the boat. We ran further up the Jolley and around to the MOA where Myrna picked up a Seatrout to round out her very own Amelia Island Back Country Slam of Flounder, Black
Drum and Seatrout.  We made one final stop up "Snook Creek", pitching jigs and live shrimp and sure enough, we got Shark bit. After a couple swirled at the boat Greg had a hookup with a large shark that had no intentions of being caught today - it spooled the reel and broke when it reached bottom!  Shortly after that Myrna had a hookup and we could tell this was another Shark, albeit a tad bit smaller. She played it perfectly and during the battle, a big Manatee came and checked us out! It eased right past the boat and under Myrna's line while she was battling the Shark. But Myrna maintained her composure, kept the pressure on, and soon landed a nice 24" Bonnethead Shark. Now that's the way to wrap up another great day to be fishing here at Amelia Island, Florida