Thawing out with Redfish
Posted: Sun Dec 10, 2017 4:17 am
It’s hard to believe we had snow in the air and on the ground Friday considering yesterday, Saturday, was spectacularly sunny and relatively warm. I took a look at the tides Saturday morning and they looked promising. The wife and daughter #2 were in the Christmas shopping and gift wrapping frame of mind. Guess I better get out of their way.
Two trucks at the ramp by the time I got there at one and zero boat trailers, zero, gosh, I love this time of year. I paddled in the clear water marveling at the soft bottom dotted with burrows and signs of the the creatures that call the mud home. But nothing living was showing in the water column. Paddle until you find bait is the sure fire cold season formula for finding the predators.
It didn’t take long to find the sign. A few mullet were hugging the shallow oyster shell. They seemed nervous. Good, nervous bait means something is making them nervous. Out just a few feet in marginally deeper water was a mud boil. Mud boil means redfish. Cast there.
Now I should say I had on a size 6 beaded chartreuse hackle black marabou woolly bugger. This fly has been great out on the lake for largemouth bass and catfish and I have wondered how a redfish might see one. A redfish will eat a woolly bugger. I did find that out. Twice, one took the chartreuse and black bugger and another took a yellow and black. But the woolly bugger wasn’t a Prime redfish fly. I passed the yellow one right in front of a nice red just off my bow and got a big yawn. Experiment over, I put on a more proven redfish pattern, the redfish crack, in Black and Tan.
The crack did well. That got me my biggest fish, a 7 pound brute that wrapped itself around my stake out stick before I finally subdued it. It took another 21” fish I didn’t weigh and some near slots. I lost that fly and a carbon copy so I went to a shrimp fly. The fish went crazy for the shrimp. I stopped counting after a couple of dozen fish. Too bad there weren’t many bruisers in the mix, I did lose a good one, but everything else seemed to be in the 15-18” zone. Cooler temperatures and the setting sun drove me in, but I definitely left them biting.
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Two trucks at the ramp by the time I got there at one and zero boat trailers, zero, gosh, I love this time of year. I paddled in the clear water marveling at the soft bottom dotted with burrows and signs of the the creatures that call the mud home. But nothing living was showing in the water column. Paddle until you find bait is the sure fire cold season formula for finding the predators.
It didn’t take long to find the sign. A few mullet were hugging the shallow oyster shell. They seemed nervous. Good, nervous bait means something is making them nervous. Out just a few feet in marginally deeper water was a mud boil. Mud boil means redfish. Cast there.
Now I should say I had on a size 6 beaded chartreuse hackle black marabou woolly bugger. This fly has been great out on the lake for largemouth bass and catfish and I have wondered how a redfish might see one. A redfish will eat a woolly bugger. I did find that out. Twice, one took the chartreuse and black bugger and another took a yellow and black. But the woolly bugger wasn’t a Prime redfish fly. I passed the yellow one right in front of a nice red just off my bow and got a big yawn. Experiment over, I put on a more proven redfish pattern, the redfish crack, in Black and Tan.
The crack did well. That got me my biggest fish, a 7 pound brute that wrapped itself around my stake out stick before I finally subdued it. It took another 21” fish I didn’t weigh and some near slots. I lost that fly and a carbon copy so I went to a shrimp fly. The fish went crazy for the shrimp. I stopped counting after a couple of dozen fish. Too bad there weren’t many bruisers in the mix, I did lose a good one, but everything else seemed to be in the 15-18” zone. Cooler temperatures and the setting sun drove me in, but I definitely left them biting.
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