Fish Tales

I guided an old friend and legendary flyfisher Joe Averill, and his son Trey, yesterday, and I took them out for fun the evening before with my brother Chip. We went far east, hoping for the phenomenon I discovered two years ago--reds pouring into the super shallow sand before sundown. Alas, it wasn't great like it was the evening before, when my buddy Bobboy McConal and his sons Scott and Sean had a stellar evening in the same area. Nonetheless, we landed four before coming in. After running a favorite west side venue at daybreak, finding little to entice me, I headed back to the same general area and shut down in about 10 inches of water. I laid out the plan--Walk east until we find the fish. It's quite counter intuitive, because it gets almost prohibitively shallow--about 5 inches--and all you see is sheepshead. It's temping to turn around. But on faith and experience, I kept the guys heading further through a dead zone until the water deepened again, and...tails sprouted ahead of us. We proceeded to cast to pods for the next two hours. Joe landed a bunch before the pods started to sweep around and head west. After a while, it was only sheepshead again. But it was a great morning, and as it turned out, it was the best we found.

Warning: Don't try to take your boat where you think we're fishing. One guy did just that yesterday am in a boat that was not equipped to go shallow, much less in 6 inches of water. He and his friends were 1/2 mile north of us, and they spent hours pushing their boat back to deeper water. Stop and wade, unless you have a Stilt or the equivalent. Or you'll regret the adventure.

More later. Got to do some counseling!

Learning New Things Takes Risks

Since I've guided less in the last few years, I've been able to explore areas of the bay formerly off limits to my guiding regimen. I would follow certain patterns designed to optimize my client's ability to land fish during the day without venturing into more speculative, more mysterious venues. However, the in past three years, I have progressively shifted away from the standard guide MOA and explored areas that have turned out to be the best action I've ever discovered on the LLM, at least in the past decade. And I have flyfished the bay since 1978, Before 2005, certain phenomena were more likely to occur, such as schools on the east side in the morning, or the redfish parade on the westside in mid-summer. Those things still happen, but I think everyone will agree that the average water depth is creeping up. Just an inch of extra water combined with warmer winters has conspired to create an entirely different ecosystem, especially on the East side. Then, with added boat traffic, the larger cohorts of redfish have shifted to nighttime feeding. It's pretty new stuff.

This past weekend, I enjoyed the best of the "new" patterns. I fish just before dark on Saturday night in an area which hosts oversized redfish at night, and caught two in the 27-28" range, and missed the cast on the dozen others that were streaming into bootie deep water as the sun touched the western horizon. The two weekends before had reaped 29-30+" reds on two consecutive outings, underscoring the robustness of this pattern. There are several westside venues where this is happening, so pick your favorite spot and check it out.

Then, on Sunday morning, Ryan and I explored the east side "new" action, which is simply hard to believe. We go to a certain area on the east side, get out in about a foot of water, and then walk east for about 500 yards. We saw nothing except a few sheepshead for almost half a mile. Anyone with a brain would have turned around and left. But having done this several times with phenomenal success, we keep wading until I ran into the first red. Ryan was 200 yards behind me, and on the basis of having seen only one red, I yelled at him to speed up and join me. Sure enough, I looked ahead and began seeing tails as far as I could see, and they were almost entirely redfish. Small pods and singles were feeding and blowing up in 6 inches of water, backs out and happy.  Ryan came up and hooked up on our first red. A while later, the north wind came up and the fish left. 

But not before we'd landed four reds and hooked a couple of more. In water that no one, not anyone fishes. It's too shallow to pole, and like I said, there's nothing for hundreds of yards. If you can walk that far on faith alone (in what I've told you), you'll probably be grateful. But not many of you will, which is also fine with me :-)

Photos to follow.