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With plans to go kayak fishing this morning (yes I’m writing at 9am instead of being out on the water), I had my friend Zach stay over so we could get an early start. I’m not really sure how well the rest of the day will go, but so far, pffft!

Part of the cause was that we realized that high tide was at midnight last night at a nearby favorite fishing spot of mine, the Jensen Beach causeway. Incoming tides are pretty good fishing at night, at least it has been for me. By fishing the light transition from the bridge shadows, you can pick up snook, Spanish mackeral, jacks, and blues. On a good night, the fishing action can be almost nonstop.

For those of you that didn’t go with us, I have good news. We didn’t catch much of anything. We did watch a novice trying to land a large snook by pulling it up to the bridge. the large fish snapped his line and slowly swam off, and the fine upstanding citizen started cussing up a blue streak that lasted, I’m not kidding here, almost an hour. He was so loud, you could hear him half a mile away.

Being the instigator that I am (and having lost more than my share of large fish), I did stoke the fire a bit as he slowed down the pace of his swearing, asking what the fish was. And like most fish stories, by the time I had worked my way along the bridge to the person, the fish had grown to have a tail that was two feet wide.

As to the rest of the fishing report, the ladyfish were active, but when aren’t they? We saw a decent black drum caught, about 10 pounds, small for the species, but mighty tasty. The shrimp were running plentiful enough for me to want to plan an outing to go shrimping. There were also dozens of blue crabs swimming around, so that sweetens the pot a bit.

Seeing how active the ladyfish were in attacking the shrimp, I decided to try to show Zach how to catch shrimp. He waded around for about 30 minutes and gave the shrimp a decent working, all of them dodging his feeble efforts to snatch them out of the water with his bare hands. I was impressed with the one thing he did catch bare handed – a sheepshead! Click here to see the picture of the monster. We ended up releasing it, since it was the only fish we caught, among other reasons.

And it seems that night time brings out all kinds. We were approached by a person of questionable motives, asking if we were interested in buying a bait aerator, he had two of them, new in the package. My paranoia kicked in my I calmly pointed out that we only fished with artificial lures, so really had no need of his offerings. I’m not positive they were stolen, but all of the signs were there…

I will say that I was impressed that he was smart enough to approach the right demographics, what better place to sell fishing gear than on a bridge full of fisherman?

We saw him later sleeping on a picnic table. Looks like he had about as much luck as we did…

I hope today proves to be better!

Peace,
db

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