The main reason I chose to fish today, it wasn’t because of the fantastic weather, was that my wife was hosting in our home 50 women for a baby shower. As much fun as that might sound, I think my all time worst day of fishing would top the best baby shower by a landslide. Truth be told, the ladies didn’t want me around anyhow.
The weather wasn’t all that bad when I got to the launch. A Northerly flow, no sunshine, but enough light to see and the wind wasn’t all that big and bad nor was it even what I call cool. A light fleece pullover was plenty to keep me comfortable.
I paddled to my spot in the marsh where I thought I might find some fish and I did find fish, but as it would turn out very few found themselves attached to my hook.
The start was promising. I made a few casts with a paddle tail and then saw something chasing bait and switched over to the fly tackle and made a cast with a Gartside SHS and got instantly rewarded with a 14” trout. But, if there was a school of trout, I must have caught a straggler or something because it was one and done on the trout.
I was still staked out when I saw something disturbing the bait along a shoreline. It was upwind and out of range so I picked up stakes and paddled on up ahead to set up an ambush. That worked like a charm as the single redfish, I could just make out the shoulders of the fish breeching the surface, kept coming right along towards the ambush point. I put the tan borski bonefish slider about a foot from the bank and maybe 4 or 5 feet ahead of the fish. Within a second or two the red was about 1.5 feet away from the slider so I gave the fly a little twitch and the red responded by surging forward and sucking in the fly, a sequence of events that never gets old.
Battle on. Not a big runner of a fish, but the initial move was towards me and I had to strip in line in hurry to keep the tension on. When I saw the fish’s shoulders for whatever reason I thought it might be a sub-slot or maybe right at 20”, but the fish turned away from me and put on a display of power. Okay, at least a slot, but with the dim light and rather murky water I still couldn’t tell where in the slot this fish fit. Turns out right in the middle. It is a miracle I even got it in the net because I thought the fish was tired out, but the red had one last card to play and it was a strong one. The dive under the kayak and then wrap around the stake out stick card. By the time I got the fish in the net, the red had made a 1/2 dozen counterclockwise 360° turns around the stake. The saying I’d rather be lucky than good never had been more pertinent.
That’s it.