Monday, July 24, 2017

One Stop Makes The Trip

Back to "work" today after a day off! I met Brant Kelch, his friend Mary and his daughter Kara down at the Big Talbot Island Park boat ramp early this morning and we headed out under some ominous skies - dark and heavy with rain sheets showing to the south of us. But as we started fishing we could see a rainbow between two storms and they passed us one to the north and one to the east, leaving us with just a brisk breeze to fish some flooding oyster beds on the Nassau River on an incoming tide.
The three anglers were tossing jigs with minnows AND live shrimp, the first time I've used them in over a month, but we had no real bites at the first stop. We then ran up to fish some docks at Seymore's Pointe and sure enough, we found some Mangrove Snapper. Mary got things started when she put a nice keeper sized fish in the boat. Both Kara and Brant hooked up and landed fish. We fished the other side of the same dock, fished one more dock, then headed further up the river.
Our next stop was up Pumpkin Hill. We had switched to float rigs and even though the conditions looked good, we were having to toss our rigs directly into the wind, making it very difficult to keep our bait up near the grass line. So we worked our way around a point, got the wind to our backs and BOOM! This did the trick. Mary caught a hungry Seatrout, then Kara put a nice keeper sized one in the boat. Mary followed that up with another keeper Trout and then they added another hard fighting Mangrove Snapper, then another keeper sized Trout. We had a few more good bites, one that ripped some drag but threw the hook, then we made one more run back to Seymore's.

Fishing a dock the trio tangled with Mangrove Snapper, putting two large ones in the boat along with a couple of puny ones. It had taken the whole trip but these anglers had worked up a nice mess of fish! And with that, we called it a day, another great one to be fishing here at Amelia Island, Florida.

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