January 19th, 2007

Today on the lagoon Betsy Schweizer took Chuck out for a day of fishing for his birthday. The day started out slow but then the moon went in the proper position. BAM the fish turned on, I think Betsy had twenty bites in twenty cast. We caught forty + fish reds, black drum and trout. The food of choice was Shrimp and Berkley Gulp Jerk shad and PowerBait.

We were fishing everything suspended in two to three feet of water except for drum fishing. Work them slow, the water is cool and the fish have been a little light on the bite. I don’t know how I use to catch these soft biting fish on mono. I only use braid such as Stren Super Braid and FireLine when fishing this way. Mono still has its place and always will. But when the fish eats and comes towards you you can (with braid) almost always feel your bite. Flounder are still around and they move around when the weather gets nasty. Tie on a 1/8- 1/4 oz jig head and bounce it off the bottom, these fish table well. I just got back from a five day trip in the Keys. I had Todd down with me and he caught Black grouper, bar jack, bonito, mackerel, mutton snapper, red grouper, yellow tail, Mangrove snapper and some ladyfish and trout in Flamingo. Flamingo was kind of dead the only place we found action was in the deeper water.

Todd caught trout to about four pounds on guess what, Gulp Jerk Shad in new penny. He also caught a few ladyfish that we tossed into the live well. We saw a few reds on snake bite but not many. We saw goliath grouper floating everywhere due to a cold front that pushed through a few weeks ago. We still saw plenty along the mangroves that we alive and we just had to toss whole lady fish at them on the flats. Dispite Todd's perfect cast and hook up they still kicked our bass and we were o fer tree. After seeing how slow Flamingo was I decided to take Todd fishing the patches on the SE side of the Keys. That is where we caught the reef fishes etc. We went back to one of my big boner flats and the first fish we saw was about seven pounds and he was just sitting on the bottom. He was so still I couldn’t even believe it was a bone fish. He flushed when we got about ten feet from him. Then Todd hooked one and pulled the hook. We only fished the flat for about two hours and saw six bonefish a few sharks and many cuda. Remember! Think like a fish to catch fish. Or just call me 386 314 5656

---

Save and Share this Article: