I had just one trip for the week, but it was a great one, with some really good redfishing.
The trip was on Friday, with David Wallsmith, and his friend, Bill Shaw, of Knox, Indiana. David is the father of my old friends Todd and Lynn Wallsmith, of Knox. David and Todd practice law together there. Well, David's friend Bill's sister was getting married on Sanibel, and he was coming to the wedding. Todd arranged for David and Bill to fish with me while they were here. I was very excited about meeting David, but Todd said he'd really hyped me up, and I figured I was in a hole I couldn't dig out of! We had a falling tide for the whole time we would be on the water. My least favorite scenario to fish!
After meeting Dave and Bill, and getting things put away, we headed out in near darkness toward the B Span flats. I hoped to quickly catch plenty of shiners and pinfish, so that I could go try to find some ladyfish without wasting too much of the higher part of the outgoing tide. But, to my surprise and delight, the first throw of the net resulted in about a dozen ballyhoo, which weren't around the last time I'd caught bait. We caught plenty more, and lots of pins, but the few shiners we had were very small. The bigger bait that had been there seemed to have disappeared.
I was really worried about spending too much of our tide chasing shiners, and was about to go fishing without them, since we had plenty of ballyhoo. But, I decided to make a quick stop at the Chino Island flats and see if we could quickly bag a few descent shiners there. I was actually quite surprised when they came so quickly, and we loaded up in two or three casts and were ready to fish.
I decided to target redfish with all those ballyhoo, and went straight to a spot that I knew was full of slot and outsized redfish. The question would be, "Will they eat?" We got our answer quickly, as we had action right from the get-go! Dave and Bill caught redfish and mangrove snapper all morning long. It wasn't an intense bite as I've seen so many times in days gone by, but it was a good, steady bite with a fish in the boat every 3 to 5 minutes. When we finally burned our last ballyhoo steak, the boys had bagged 15 redfish and a dozen mangrove snapper. We kept 2 reds and 3 snapper. The reds ranged from 18 to 29 inches, with most of them being at the higher end of the spectrum. And, Dave and Bill also managed one redfish double before it was over.
Once we began catching a catfish here and there, I knew the tide was slowing, and the bite would be over sooner rather than later. And, it was. By then, David was ready for a visit to the Waterfront Restaurant which he'd heard about from Todd. After enjoying a great lunch we headed back to the ramp to clean fish. It had been a great day, which to be honest had exceeded my expectations on the tide we had to fish. Dave and Bill had been great, caught on quickly, and only missed a fish or two. And, they had just been so thrilled with the pull and raw beauty of those redfish. The fish had ranged in color from a deep bronze to almost a bright orange color, which I found to be unusual.
The islands of floating turtle grass are still everywhere, and there were volumes of it floating on the tide out of the backcountry. Fortunately, we were able to work through it and catch some great fish.