One Or The Other

My fishing logs from the past do not lie.  We started out to fish the flats but were seduced by the sight of a very large sheepshead swimming under the dock as we put in.  We fished the river.  While I geared up the rods Bec proceeded to catch fifty-eleven redfish, all pups.  While I tried to fish she continued to catch short reds which, while I took them off the hook, my bait was stripped.  So while I re-baited, Bec caught more reds.  This continued for a very long time.  Finally, I caught a fish.  A big fish.  A keeper redfish which turned out to be the first of only two keeper fish of the day.  While we were fishing the weather went from calm to really blowing with waves in the river.  We rejoiced that we were not on the flats being blown to hell and back.  We fished and fished and fished.  I caught a small sheepshead and then a keeper sheepshead.
Nice fish.  We started with 150 shrimp and we should have gotten 200.  More on that later.  The tide was just ripping along and the water was so clear we could see the bottom at 6'.  I was casting to a pole in the water near the shore and I turned to put a shrimp on my hook, when I turned back a log had floated up to the pole.  I asked Bec if that log had been there all the time or if it just appeared.  We stared at it and it started to move.  Upstream.  It was a pale Manatee.  It stuck it's snout out of the water, looked at us, and moved on by.  Later, three large tarpon glided by, on their way to wherever tarpon go when no one's cleaning fish at the dock.  I can say from experience, tarpon are big on being fed fish carcass at the dock.  The fishing slowed so we did what we always do when the fishing is slow.  We ate.

We ate chips,

We ate boiled peanuts,

We stood on the bow and wished for fish.






Alas, fishing as we know it was over for the day.  We continued to catch little fish.  Pinfish.  We used up 150 shrimp.  And we made our fatal decision.  We would go back to the dock and get another 100 shrimp.  We got greedy.  The fish gods had given us two nice fish and we wanted more.  We motored back to the dock, got 100 more shrimp, motored back to the spot we had been anchored in, and caught nothing.  We lost many more shrimp to pinfish before Bec took a short nap and I contemplated absolutely nothing.  We decided to throw in the towel.  Back to the dock where I cleaned the redfish and the sheepshead, possibly two of the most difficult fish to clean owing to the size and thickness of their scales.  I feel like I have to drill through them, not an easy task.  We take a side trip to Lighthouse Seafood where Tammy hooks us up with a half a croaker sack of oysters and we get home later than we wanted with fish and oysters and dogs happy to see us.  The next adventure:  can you steam oysters in a pressure cooker?  Hope to safely find out.

Do They Make Bad Fishing Days?

This is the Good:

Friday
N 8kt
Hi: 75 °F

The Bad:

 

 and,

 The Rest Of The Story:

The answer is 47.  No, actually the answer is: there are no bad fishing days.  There are bad catching days, bad weather days, bad engine problem days, bad equipment days, bad sandwich days, blah, blah, blah.  Fishing does not allow crybabies.  There is no crying in fishing.  Unless you get a hook completely through your finger right in the middle of one of the best mackerel runs in a long time and your fishing partner, a nurse no less, can't stand the sight of your blood and a large hook sticking through your thumb so she insists that you stop fishing and drive all the way to the emergency room to have it cut out which, frankly, hurt more than the damn hook in my finger and by the time that adventure was over so was the fishing for the day at which time I did feel like crying because we were catching mackerel dammit.  We're over that now.  Fishing tomorrow looks good.  Beautiful weather but flat tide.  Cold front, which means the fishing in the river will have picked up.  If it picks up more than the two redfish I caught last week I will be delirious.  My fishing logs, starting in 2006, show an even split between mackerel on The Rise and redfish in the river.  Depends upon the water temperature and the tide.  And the fishing gods.  On every occasion this time of year we tried the flats and the river and filled the cooler on one or the other.  We currently have sheepshead fever and will probably try the river at some point.  Anticipating going fishing is almost as much fun as fishing without having to clean the boat.  Today we anticipate, tomorrow, we fish.

One Fish Two Fish, Redfish, Blue Runner