Acres of Bluefish Orlando Fishing Report
Last week an attempt was made to almost poetically describe how lucky those of us who live and fish in central Florida are. This week again re-emphasises that fact. Fact! Not fiction! Not opinion! FACT!!!
So Monday the Sevylor inflatable kayak got pumped up and somewhat unceremoniously dumped into my favorite St. Johns River location. The Sevylor reminded me again how lucky we are to have fairly rigid plastic kayaks for most of the paddling we want to do. That thing paddles so badly. Anyway, the bite was not hot. Five bass came to hand, all on surface flies, in about four hours. The place was just too quiet. No surface activity, no alligators, it just didn't look right. That's OK, I'll be back.
About noon on Tuesday the Ocean Kayak was dropped into the Econlockhatchee. Shortly afterwards I hopped in and we went off down the river.
Godzilla lives there, no kidding. There are some gawdawful big alligators there.
The bass bite again was not hot, although I certainly caught some. Once I switched to streamers I did a little better. Certainly the redbellies and stumpknockers were aggressive.
At one point the kayak was pulled up on the bank so I could wade along a sandbar and cast to the shoreline. When the bar ended I turned and headed back upriver to where the kayak waited patiently for me. As soon as I had turned around a fat garfish glided gracefully across the bar, only about 15 feet away. The streamer landed a foot in front of him. One twitch and WHAM! He hit it like a barracuda, just an awesome strike. I actually hooked and landed him, one of two I got.
With a small bluegill popper or rubber spider you could easily have 40 or 50 fish days there right now. Please let me know if you'd like me to show you.
Wednesday the Bang-O-Craft was launched at River Breeze for some scouting for my Thursday/Friday charter. The water is low, but in most places it's also kind of dirty. I saw a fish here, a couple fish there, and managed to successfully sight cast two nice redfish into submission using a silver Johnson Minnow. I got a lot of fish on the DOA Deadly Combo but all of them were small ones. Still, enough fish were observed that I thought we had a reasonable chance of catching a few over the next couple of days.
Thursday Dr. Jim Colgan and Dr. Bill Thomas joined me for a day's fishing on Mosquito Lagoon. Good guess if you said we launched the Mitzi at River Breeze. With the exception of a single anemic seatrout caught using the Deadly Combo, we got our only fish, a rather anemic-looking 15 inch red, at about 2 PM, on a Johnson Minnow. We maybe saw a dozen fish all day. Yeah, it was not a skunking but it was dangerously close, certainly a real tough day. The good doctors decided that they had had enough fun and declined the option on Friday.
With my newly opened up Friday I decided to use the kayak to really explore a place I had unsuccessfully dabbled in several years earlier. My Friday attitude was, "If there are fish here I will find them."
The paddle was lovely with lots of birds. I got to watch skimmers skimming, coots cooting, and bald eagles bald eagling. The only fish I found, however, were Gambusia and mullet. The experiment, although extremely pleasant, failed.
My friend Tammy has a job and can only fish on weekends. Even though I don't like fishing weekends I do like fishing with Tammy, so Saturday morning an 830 we launched the Mitzi at Port Canaveral and went out onto a somewhat snotty Atlantic hoping to find tripletail. We did not find one. But we did find acres of bluefish, with lots of crevalle jacks and a few big ladyfish thrown in. All these denizens of the deep attracted a load of big sharks, too. We lost a couple hooked fish to shark attacks and hooked several big sharks on chunks of ladyfish.
Tammy used a big ChugBug until a shark relieved her of it, then used a Mirrolure. A jack tore the back hook off and she kept right on catching fish with it. I used several Upperman jigs. I'm pretty sure anything with a hook would have worked. The fish were REAL numerous and REAL aggressive. We had a wonderful time.
And that is this week's Acres of Bluefish Orlando Fishing Report from Spotted Tail.
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John Kumiski
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