Wednesday, September 12, 2012

We got Soaked....

.....a couple of times this morning, but the fishing turned out great.  I had checked the weather report last night and it called for a 20% chance of precipitation and I think we got all of it between 8 and 9!  I had met Mathew Shelor and his fiance Katie at the Atlantic Seafood dock at 7am this morning. If you looked south the skies were OK, but if you looked north, there was huge, dark thundercloud. And that's the direction I wanted to go!  So we headed west.  We ran up Lanceford Creek and fished a flooded oyster flat and grass clump and Katie broke the ice early by hooking up with a couple of feisty Redfish and a Snapper.  The weather appeared to clear north so we pointed toward Tiger Island, but on the way the rain came down with so much ferocity I had to slow down to a crawl in order to see, and we all got soaked!  But we ran through it and made our way to a nice looking spot.  I "anchored" with the Minnakota I-Pilot and just as the anglers got their float rigs baited, the bottom fell out again and the wind picked up to an unbearable blow.  Soaked with rain again, we cranked the big engine and rain around behind Tiger Island and immediately found protection from the wind and the rain quit.  We tied up at first (for me to gather my wits) and Katie again found some Snapper.  Later, as we trolled along the shoreline, Katie picked up a couple of fat Seatrout and as Matt was pulling in a Snapper, she hooked up with  hard fighting keeper sized Black Drum.  Katie was getting all the pictures and was having a lot of success on the boat and graciously offered the bow to Matt, when his rod bent over and drag ripped out - FISH ON!  This fish was big and fighting hard, but Matt played it perfectly and with Katie on the net, they landed a nice, 23" Slot Redfish!  We continued to fish the island, staying out of the wind.  The two anglers already had an Amelia Island Back Country Slam of sorts with Redfish, Drum and Seatrout, but they also added a couple of keeper sized Flounder, a couple more Trout, and Matt wrapped up the trip by landing a nice, keeper sized Sheepshead.  All fish caught today were released to be caught another day.  With that, we called it a day, another great one to be out on Amelia Island waters!

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