Catchin Without the Muds

 With the scarcity of mud minnows at the bait shops now days, we're having to go with live shrimp and boy, do we blow thru a bunch! I fished Friday and today with the Raker Team - John and his mother Betty and their friend Kenny King. Friday we fished out around Nassauville and caught a few - we had a small Red, some small Seatrout, a small Flounder and a handful of small Mangrove Snapper, and Kenny tangled with a hard fighting Jack Crevalle.

Today we met out at Oyster Bay and made our first stop back down Lanceford, fishing floats on the very first of a high and outgoing tide. Betty got hot early catching Seatrout off the stern. John picked up a feisty Redfish and Kenny battled two Black "puppy" Drum to the net, one of which was of keeper size. As it turned out we got fish at almost every stop today. We made our way down Lanceford and over to the outside of Tyger and switched to jigs and again had a good flurry of fish catching. Betty put a keeper Whiting in the boat and John battled a huge Bonnethead shark to the boat for pictures and release.  We eased up the outside of Tyger to fish a large drainage with the jigs in hopes of getting Flounder but it was Seatrout that bit our live shrimp on the jigs. Around the corner and up into the Jolley we fished the "bank" and picked up a couple of feisty Reds and I tossed the cast net briefly to get a few finger mullet for bait.

After making our way up the Jolley we stopped at another large drainage and drifted the floats along the exposed shell and here Betty had a good string of feisty Redfish catches. Our bait had dwindled to almost nothing but we had a couple of shrimp left and those few mullet so we worked the outside of Snook Creek and picked up one more keeper Whiting. John had put a mullet under a float and after a good cast we all saw a big fish roll on the bait and BAM! That float was gone! We could tell it was a nice fish - John played it patiently and worked it slowly to the net to landed a big 20" Gator Trout, boy what a fish. Although we didn't have mud minnows the shrimp provided good action so as we headed back to the ramp we counted it as another great day to be fishing here at Amelia Island, Florida.