Due to obligations (work) I was only able to get on the water once last week. Mark and I decided to check out a new area. We got a late start because we didn’t have any expectations and we wanted to give the fog a chance to burn off. We thought we’d do more exploring than fishing, especially considering Mark recently installed a new GPS unit on his boat that he wanted to test out.
The first area we ran to was filled with duck hunters, so we moved on. We bounced around a few areas with only one redfish that was hanging on the edge of deep water near structure. We fished a while longer before we decided to make a run to a mud flat to see if there were any fish up shallow. By this point the winds were strong out of the SW and the water was dirty, so we decided to drift out of the boat instead of wading or fishing out of the kayaks.
Early in the first drift Mark caught a nice red. We also caught a few 20-22″ trout. Toward the end of the drift I hooked a pig redfish that I knew had to be over the slot. I fought the fish for a while but it ended up pulling the hook near the boat.
We decided to make another drift through the area. Early the next drift I hooked another solid fish that I knew had to be over the slot. After a several minute tussle I landed my biggest redfish to date. I didn’t measure it but it bottomed out my 15lb boga. I’m guessing it weighed around 20lbs. We caught a few more trout about the same size as before. Nothing huge but solid fish.
We kept drifting through the area. Later, Mark and I hooked big reds at nearly the same time so we had a double. It was chaos trying to keep the fish from tangling our lines together. We were climbing around each other and over the kayaks that we hauled with us. Mark landed his fish first. It was a slightly over the slot fish than was dwarfed by my fish. We measured this one and it was over 35″ and weighed a pound or two less than the first donk I landed. We landed a few more trout but the bite slowed down significantly after we doubled up, so we called it a day soon thereafter.
We caught most of our fish in the middle of the day on a 3′ deep mud flat. Every fish was landed on a morning glory Hackberry Hustler. Fish were most active in between two tides.
