I had the pleasure of taking a day off last week and spending the day surf fishing with my parents. Due to past articles I believe that most of you all know that some of my fondest child hood memories are related around spending the day with my family surf fishing and last Tuesday is now yet another one of those great memorable experiences.
We pulled away from the boat ramp around 8 am and ran down the river to a large mud flat. The flat was loaded with some really nice finger mullet and after 5 quick casts of the net we had over 5 dozen finger mullet. We headed on out to the sandbar and as we pulled into the gully it was loaded with large schooling mullet. Literally thousands of 12 to 16 inch mullet were running in behind the bar so I threw the net a couple of more times and caught some big mullet to chunk.
By now it was 9-o’clock, dead low tide, so we beached the boat and walked across the bar to the breakers. I got my mom rigged up and chunked her bait out just beyond the breakers. Dad and I then waded out to throw ours when I noticed mom’s line was almost parallel with the beach. Had her bait already washed in? Had I made a bad cast? I looked back at mom and just then she and I both realized she had a fish on and it had run straight towards the beach. She quickly reeled in the slack and set the hook and just as the fish started to run the line parted. I was disappointed that she lost the fish, but highly encouraged that we had a strike within the first 2 minutes.
Over the next 2-hours we managed to land (8) nice Blue Fish all between 3 and 4 pounds, another (15) cutoffs from Blues (2) Channel Bass one around 30-inches and the other close to 40-inches and had multiple other strong strikes and missed fish.
When fishing the surf I prefer a 10 to 12-foot surf rod matched to 20-pound test and capable of slinging a 3 to 5-ounce pyramid sinker. I always use a Carolina Rig (utilizes a sinker slide), 2-feet of coated 60-pound seven strand leader and a Mustad Ultra Point 5/0 short