Got out to BB yesterday morning. Fished the outgoing tide with not much luck. Once the tide turned they lit up. BIG shrimp. 1-2 dozen per throw. Learned a lot. My first time out to BB. First of all, it is a b&tch navigating through BB at low tide if you don’t know where you’re going. GPS helped but it is still treacherous for a newbie to BB. Secondly, it took me a while to use my brain. We got in to BB and was marking stuff on the bottom and threw a couple of blind casts and caught one here, two there. Then we moved out further and set a couple of test poles and they fell over and sank! Then we moved out further into about 8-10 feet and threw a couple more times and caught nothing. Then i said to my buddy John, “Why don’t we go back to where we were catching them!” Duh! What a genius I am! Went back there and saw two other boats set up and we set up about 30 mins before dead low. We had a Flipper convention in between our poles for a while. Thought they were eating the bait balls but they weren’t. Finally accepted the fact that there is nothing legal we can do to rid ourselves of them and forged ahead. We ended up with half a cooler of BIG shrimp. Also learned that patience is key. We would make a pass on the 8 poles, and immediately go back and start again. We would catch shrimp on every throw, but not a lot. I noticed the guy next to us would make a pass and then pull away and wait for a few mins and then make another run. We tried it and then we were catching 1-2 dozen per throw. The tide was coming in really fast and we had to pull the poles early because they were almost under water. Next time I will set them a little shallower. Got pretty windy at the end which was affecting the throws. We set the balls for the outgoing tide, and not relative to wind. Balls were placed directly “down stream” from the poles on the out going tide. Should have placed them adjacent to the poles, which would have given us free access to them regardless of the tide
Lessons learned today:
- Don’t leave shrimp to find shrimp
