The weather FINALLY looked to be nice on a Saturday, and the tide appeasred favoreable for an afternoon fishing trip… So yesterday, I called or tried to call, everyone I could, to invite them to fish the last two hours of an outgoing tide and the first two of the incoming before dark…
Three intrepid anglers and myself, Tugboat, CrackerYak and Mark, arrived at the super secret launch site at 1 P.M. and started fishing… The last two hours of the outgoing was uneventful, but the area looked VERY Promising… Almost Copahee Sound promising… Very Shallow, lots of oysters, no decent boat launches for stinkpotters nearby… This combination means this area gets little fishing pressure compared to most areas in Beaufort…
When the tide changed, Tugboat and I spooked a huge school of reds in the flats, the water boiled around us in an area the size of a football field… We quickly dropped anchor and started casting, to no avail… Crackeryak soon joined us…
The school had moved a hundred yards up the flats, and was not returning to our immediate area… After about half an hour of casting, we decided to move up the flats slowly, so as not to spook the fish… But they kept just out of reach… About another half hour passed, and suddenly, we saw the water boil and they started moving back towards us… I cast a 2" New Penny Gulp Shrimp on a plain lead jighead about 20 yards in front of the school and waited until the school was over my jig, then I twitched the rod, and BAM… Fish on!
For what seemed like an hour, but was closer to 5 or 10 minutes, I fought the fish on 8 lb test brained line, the drag screaming constantly, neither the fish nor I giving up more than a couple of yards at a time… Finally I got the tired fish yak side and attempted to grab him by his lips with my bare hand… (Having lost my expensive lip grippers in November, and waiting patiently for Santa to get me some new ones in a couple of weeks… ) Bad move, as I now have several lacerations on my thumb from the attempt,
