Perfect Tide

I did an afternoon trip today, meeting Rick and Candi VanHove and their son Mason up at the Dee Dee Bartels Park boat ramp shortly after noon. We had what I'd call a perfect tide, low and the first of an incoming, so we had to creep thru the mouth of Tiger but then we made our way around to deep water. No Shrimp today! As most know, inshore shrimping has been closed since April and will stay closed thru May and live bait shrimp are hard to come by. But we had some lively mud minnows and we baited up with those on our 1/4oz jigs and the anglers began pitching to the bank.  I was really encouraged
when Rich had a hookup, a strong bite, and he battled a nice feisty Redfish to the net. Skunk Off!

But after that we had not much of a nibble so we came back out and ran up to the Jolley River to fish some still exposed oysters.  Candi and Mason were fishing float rigs back in the stern while Rick stayed with a jig up on the bow and it was Rick again who had a hookup, this time putting a keeper sized Seatrout in the boat.   We did have a nibble here and there but no more takers, so we continued on around to some docks at Bell River. After getting no bites there, we finished the loop back to the mouth of Bell, where we hit a couple of flooded oysters. We did have a few bites that pulled the float under, but nothing that must have any size.

As it turned out, it was somewhat of slow day. But it was nice and sunny and a pleasure to be out on the water here at Amelia Island, Florida.