Thursday, June 21, 2018

First Fish Oversized!

We squeezed in a late afternoon trip yesterday, Mike DuBartell and I, meeting down at the Sawpit Creek boat ramp. At the time, we had partly cloudy skies and still some serious heat, but, it was time to fish! We headed up the intercoastal and dipped into Jackstaff, first checking to see if the tide was going to get up for tailing Redfish (no) so we eased into a smaller creek and set up fishing with float rigs and live shrimp. The tide high and still coming in and even though Mike was getting excellent drifts, we had no real bites.

After running thru Horsehead we made a stop at some rocks at Seymore's Pointe, drifted the float, and again, no bites. Knowing that we had high water for a while, I thought it'd be a good idea to try Christopher Creek. After the short run we were tossing jigs and shrimp to the dock pilings and rocks. Mike noted that he had a bite or two, then he had strong bite and BAP! Leader broke!  But Mike kept at it and finally, BOOM! Big Fish On!  I thought it was odd that the fish boiled to the surface in 10" of water so quickly and even as quickly as Mike worked it to the boat. But when we saw that it was a huge Redfish I knew that the battle had just begun! Sure enough, the big fish began to make some surges to the bottom, but Mike kept the pressure on, working the fish left to right to left and he soon wore him out and landed an oversized 27.25" Redfish, boy what a fish! After pictures the fish was gently released to swim back to the depths. (All fish caught were released).

We worked the banks for a while, had some bites, landed another Slot Redfish, then moved on out of there before the tide dropped too much. We made another pit stop at the rock of Seymore's, had a few nibbles, and caught one "baitstealer" then we moved on down the Nassau River to fish some banks that were now beginning to expose oysters.

Mike was still tossing the jig rod, up current, and after one particular cast,  hooked up and landed a fat Seatrout.  He later tangled with a high flying Ladyfish. We had been keeping our eyes on the dark thunderstorms to the north of us and had having sprinkling rain for the last hour, but we never did get really wet, so as we headed in, we counted it as another great day to be fishing here at Amelia Islands, Florida.

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