No Fly Zone

An absolutely beautiful day greeted Tom McDonough and I when we made it to the boat ramp early this morning. There was just a slight breeze and a few high clouds in the sky when we left the Sawpit Creek boat ramp and headed up the intercoastal with a bait well full of live shrimp, some spinning rods, and a couple of fly rods rigged up. We dipped in to Jackstaff Creek, split off into a smaller creek and set up at a large marsh run out just as the tide hit peak high.

Tom started off tossing a 7w fly rod with a floating line and a Gurgler foam fly and was
making excellent casts right from the git-go. We worked the mouth of that run out then eased along the flooded marsh grass, but I can't say we had as much as one good hit on the fly. After crossing over Jackstaff and starting another pass with the trolling motor, and switching up to live shrimp under a float, BOOM! We started catching fish. Tom had a good flurry of catches using a circle hook under his float, which made for some quick releases after photographs were taken.  We did that bank for about 100 yards, caught  handful of Trout, then crossed over to fish a sandbar/point with jigs and shrimp, to no avail.

After running through Horsehead we made brief stop at some docks at Seymore's Pointe to see if there were any Mangrove Snapper were around....there weren't...so we continued on down the Nassau River to Pumpkin Hill and went back to the float rigs. I was beginning to think the bite was done for the day when Tom made a pin point cast to an island of marsh grass. His float eased under and after setting the hook, Tom had a nice fish on. He played it patiently - this fish was pulling harder and digging deep - Tom landed a  nice chuncky Redfish. We worked that marsh grass thoroughly and put 3-4 more Reds in the boat.

Our last stop was down at Broward Island and here Tom went back to the fly rod, tossing the  7w with the floating line and trying an 8w with an intermediate line but the fish wanted none of the flies.
But it was a beautiful day and a great one to be out on Amelia Island waters!