We Should Have Brought Scout

Let's all welcome winter fishing with a show of blue-fingered hands.  Brrr. The weather report showed a Small Craft Warning, 20kt winds, and a low tide 1' below low mean.  This means difficulty anchoring in a river of mostly mud.  We couldn't wait!  When we got to the dock the tide was about the lowest I've seen in a long time.  Usually, you can see about 3' of mud from the dock to water.  Today there was about 50'.  Motoring away from the dock was a challenge multiplied by the fact that the middle of the channel only had 3' of water.  We're talking low.  We gingerly motored down the Wakulla and up the St. Marks which, thankfully is a much narrower river and dredged.  The narrowness causes a deeper channel and we did find about 10' in the shallowest parts.  Itty Bitty channel + cold front + North wind = lots of fish, or so the equation should go.  In fact, it DID equal lots of fish!  But first, a word about Sheepshead.

This is a Sheepshead (the one in the foreground, the one in the background is a Straw Hat Head)

Sheepshead are notoriously difficult to catch.  They have two or three rows of flat, square, chicklet-like teeth and they are very, very picky, delicate eaters.  

This is Scout, an ancient Australian Shepherd who has never been fishing but you have to have a sheepdog in a Sheepshead story.



We anchored at one of our favorite spots in the river and commenced fishing.  The wind, at this point, was just blowing.  Later it would begin howling.  Bec easily caught a (wait for it) Sheepshead.  "Wow, we never catch those!"  Well, we did catch those.  We only caught those.  

We caught one at a time,

we caught two at a time,






we caught nothing but Sheepshead all the time.  Normally, this is not something I would complain about but, the more we caught the sharper the vision of me having to clean all these Sheepshead became.  Sheepshead and Redfish are very hard to clean.  Big scales, tough skin.  Wonderful to eat, tough to clean.  Anyway, we fished and we caught.  And then, 

we ate.  What?  Did you think we weren't going to eat!




As you can see from the lovely mud background, the river was still low.  But, the wind was picking up.  We started out measuring every fish and keeping every 12-incher.  We got more discriminating the more we caught.  Finally,

after being blown into the trees and after 

taking on leaves and tree limbs, 




and just generally being blown all over the place, we packed up to go home.  I was dreading cleaning all those fish, Bec was dreading cleaning the boat in the cold so, we did both together.  

Catch of the day:  six nice Sheepshead.