We had another bang em up trip on Friday for Reds. My biceps and shoulders are still sore from the nearly non-stop casting, hooking, fighting, unhooking that took place.
We decided to fish the Fishing for memories fishing rodeo again this year. Knowing that we have a number of spots that produce big reds we thought we could place at minimum. I thought I had it last year with about 14.8 lbs of reds. The end result of last year was that you need 16 lbs to win the tournament.
Like last year I brought my 6 year old son. My wife; upset that we didn’t place last year wanted to come this year though. She was determined to show us up. It turned into a family affair. I knew it was gonna be a good day when we actually left the house on time.
We arrived to the honey hole right around sunrise. The North wind was sedate early in the morning, making the run nice and smooth. The 30 minute ride to the spot was cool also. The customers were fired up and ready to catch some fish (I was glad). I decided to catch bait in the canal adjacent to the lake we were fishing. That canal was chock-block full of finger mullet too. It took 2 casts with the cast nets to fill up the live well’s for the day’s bait.
On the high tide I knew the red’s would be hugging the bank, and I knew the bank they would be running. Boy were they. We motored up to the bank and I noticed immediately 2 to 3 huge singular waves running parallel to the bank, not 4 foot off of it. It looked like 2-3 schools of half-dozen reds in each school. They were running so close together it looked like one wave….Very neat! I knew it wouldn’t take long, and I wanted to get my son his fish first. I chunked a live mullet in front of the closest wave and handed the rod to my son. Within 30 seconds I saw the line moving with the wave. I chuckled to myself and didn’t say anything, it wasn’t until the fish nearly pulled the rod from my son’s hand that he realized what was going on line. “I GOT ONE”. The fish hooked itself, LOL. He fought a 29 incher for about 10 minutes before we landed it; Too big for the tournament, but pretty fun.
That is pretty much how it went for me. Baiting, throwing the line, netting, unhooking and culling fish….I had to wait until my wife and son were tuckered out to get my fishing in. I did have a slip up when I chunked a 26 inch fish (my wife’s) in the ice chest. Before I could even close the ice chest, the fish bounced out of the ice chest and into the water? We all stood there and stared at each other for a moment like “There goes the tournament”. The general problem we had though was that the fish were too big. I would say we caught a 28.5 inch fish on average. We kept 12 red fish and a couple of speckled trout that I caught in 1.5 foot of water?
We hit a few juuuusssttt right sized reds though. When we left the weigh in on Friday, my wife was in third with 11.9 pounds, I was in first with 16.5 pounds and my son was in first with a 6.5 lb’er. When we showed up to the awards ceremony on Sunday we soon found he was bumped though, the only fish that placed were mine. Oh well, we will be back at them next year. Until then we had some great memories.
Hope everyone else had an equally great weekend.
06-25-2012, 09:52 AM
Flats fishing; one for the memories
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