Monday, May 28, 2018

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!

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