Monday, March 25, 2013

A Day with Many Titles - Prefishing Day 1

One of the funny things that blogging does to me is that I find myself thinking about the "name" of my day while I'm out fishing.  So this first day of scouting for Paddle Palooza Ten was normal in that aspect but not so much because it was a remarkable day for so many different reasons.

First of all I realized I forgot my camera when I was 20 minutes from home.  So the first name of the day was "I Can't Believe I Forgot My Camera" (the saga of that name continues as I had 55" of fish disqualified for one online tournament, and 100 pts vanished for another online tournament - ouch).  Then as I drove down the road, I saw reds in the water, from the road three different times.  So I thought the title I didn't want to get stuck with was, "You Drove by All Those Redfish for This?".

But then I got out of my launch site, paddled through my first turn (actually missed my first turn) and then I'm in shocked when I look around and see Tails up out of the water all around me.  And these tails are massive, larger than my hand spread as wide as I can.  So I'm thinking the title is "EPIC" but I spend the next 30 minutes casting with no results.  I'm getting aggravated fast.  Then I pull in a 15.5 inch speckled trout. Finally I paddle into the fish and realize I'm surrounded by bull Black Drum - decidedly not the target species for the day.

Finally I catch a fish and after about 12 pictures I get one tolerable shot with my phone:

And that's the way the rest of the day went if I could get around the Hundreds of Black drum I could find some unbelievable reds.  I had a hard time catching anything in the slot (16-27 inches) they were all bulls.


I won't bore you with 8 shots of various sized fish but it was truly an amazing day.
the working title became "A Remarkable Day: for many reasons".

Finally it was time to try and catch a trout.  That's when I trolled up this beast:

That's a forty inch fish my best redfish ever.

I never caught another trout.  But I went on to catch a few more bull reds, and one 25 inch Black drum.  I do plan on coming back later with some cracked crab and get some major sleigh rides from those bull drum!  I saw some fish that were Crazy Big - another title for the day was "Black Drum Gather for Invasion" or yet another was "The Running of the Bulls".

Finally I realized; about half way in, to thank God and forget about the camera issues and just enjoy the day God made.  When the final fish resulted in a cramp in the arm - I knew it had really been a remarkable day.

God bless

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