Where's Your Rods?

There was only a slight breeze when Bob Blalock and I left the dock at Goffinsville Park and headed down the Nassau River. Although there was a bit of overcast skies, when we eased the throttle down on the north end of Broward Island I could tell that even the breeze was blocked by the island and I had this contented feeling that we were going to have a great start to a fishing day until Bob raised the question, "where's your rods?"  Oh lordy. I had left them in the truck. Ouch. We buzzed back to the ramp, I ran up to the truck and retrieved the rods - we surely needed them- then we headed back to Broward and set up outside an outflow to fish

with jigs and shrimp.

We had pretty good action, catching small Reds, small Trout, a small Black Drum and a small Flounder to quickly garner an "Amelia Island Back Country Grande Slam". We worked the bank with jigs and caught a fish here and there, but nothing of any size.  The tide finally started back in so we moved up to the north end and within a few casts Bob had a good bite. This one was pulling drag and sure enough, when landed, turned out to be a nice 19" Slot fish.  We had few  more smaller fish before we headed back down the Nassau.

Our next stop was along some flooding oysters and here we had  short flurry of fish catches - a Red, a Croaker and a Catfish. After that we buzzed thru Horsehead and fished the mouth of Jackstaff. Bob was getting good drifts with a float rig and shrimp and it paid off. He landed a good 18" keeper sized Seatrout and a couple of hard fighting Jack Crevalle. All fish caught today were released (even the bloody Red - it lived in the live well for 3 hours and then swam off when released) We caught a bunch of fish once we had our rods and it made for a great day of fishing here at Amelia Island, Florida.