Catch'n in the Current

I fished this morning with Roger Pickett and his buddy David, meeting them up at the Dee Dee
Bartels Park and boy was it a nice morning (for a while). The tide had been coming in for a couple of hours but we tried our first stop over a Tiger Island and we found that the logs were still exposed so the two anglers began pitching jigs and shrimp to the pockets. Although we had numerous "bait stealing" nibbles we had not luck until Roger hooked up and brought to the boat a nice keeper sized Black "puppy" Drum.  He also tangled with a eel for a bit!

We came out and around and fished a run out onthe outside of Tiger to no avail, then continued on around to Jolley bank and switched to float rigs and the live shrimp. We all noticed that there was very little current along that stretch and we had no bites.

After running up the river we stopped just south of Snook Creek and began fishing the bank and here the current was running. David had made a good cast up above a grassy patch and as his float drifted by it slowly went under. David lifted his rod to set the circle hook and, Fish On!  We knew right of that this was a big fish - David's reel was ripping and the fish was running at-will. When it got up shallow I was concerned that it would cut itself off on the oysters in shallow water but David worked him out patiently to deeper water then applied the pressure and soon landed a nice 24" Slot Redfish.

We worked on down the bank and got into some Seatrout, a couple which were keeper size, and Roger battled two big Bonnethead Sharks to the boat, then we headed back up the river to fish another grass line. Again, there was very little current and we had no bites.

We could see some really dark clouds heading our way and when we checked the radar we could see  that it was definitely heading straight for us so we pulled up the trolling motor and raced back to the boat ramp to get shelter  from the storm , and boy was it a storm! But we had had a good stretch of fish catching early so we counted it as another great day to be fishing here at Amelia Island, Florida.