10/28 - REPEAT....less wind, but HOT.

Had Mike M. and his brother-in-law Phil aboard. Mike's wife is one of those rare wives that honored Mike back last Father's Day, with an private fishing charter for two, gift certificate.

I told her, to have Mike give me a call when it got to be "fall", because the fishing is better than, and it's not as hot as summer........."Well, the joke was on us, it was like a summer day."

It might as well been a tad cooler August day out there.

So we tried a good acclimation spot near the Navy base to start. We had a falling tide most of the day. Neither Mike or Phil had ever float-rigged before, but it didn't seem to matter. These guys were on top of it, like no tomorrow. Bait casters....no problem! Even though they admitted to being "egg beater" users in the past. So I could tell. Tackle handling wasn't going to be an issue today. And that was good.

The Jacks I believe pretty much have left us with the big mullet a few weeks ago. Around 10/7 when I was out at the jetties with Craig F. casting top water lures to them, and getting his butt handed to him. So what was the first catch today? A tiny 1/4 pound Jack or two. And a Lookdown fish. Lookdown's are some what tropical. So that says to me, I guess the water just isn't cool enough yet? I read 71 on my temp gauge.

I had yesterday's Trout spot in the forefront of my mind. If I could only judge when to be there with this west wind pushing the falling tide out pretty hard. It was warm, and the west wind had everything to do with that I'm sure.

So we pulled up stakes and hit the spot where the Trout came from on Tuesday. The current was so strong it was ridicules. My anchor got stuck on something too, as I went to rescue Doc Miller that was there with his anchor wrapped in his prop. The anchor "chain" was wrapped on some kind of junk on the bottom. But I did manage to finally get it off, and get over to Doc Miller who had his secondary anchor out. So we helped him. Then, headed on.

Had no plans of doing any big Redbass fishing in the deep today.......heck with that!! I wanted to stay on the float-rig and find some Trout.

I was replacing the water in my bait well every once in a while, and noticed I was getting a big time die off again! In the morning the shrimp were jumping out of the bait tank, and now they were hardly moving. I checked the river water and the salinity was super low. Around a 18 part per thousand. As the west wind blew this river water out, most likely the less salty the water became. Non-spunky shrimp makes for not a very good Trout bait.

We found some fish and weeded through a bunch of 14 inch male trout, and only boxed one or two good keepers. On a spot that even gave up 4 pound fish in July!!!!! So I'm really wondering where they are at, at this point.

So we moved on to basically the last spot of the day. No current, be we waited it out and finally the incoming tide (less than 4' on the tide charts) came and we had a chance. We boxed and released a decent amount of Specks and Yellowmouths.

And Mike even got rocked up, by a Black Grouper! His float went down, and he had a serious bend in the light trout rod. Then, the fish just quit. I said give it a little slack. And he did, and the fish swam out of it's hidey hole. A really decent size "inshore" Grouper, just as purty as a peach.

We ran out of bait on this spot and ended up catching a few more Yellowmouth Trout on dead shrimp. Then came the Pinfish. So we headed back to clean the catch.

Again, through hard work and diligence we had a decent bag of fillets so the guys could have a fish fry.

I'm back at it and it looks like I'll end October 2009 with a Friday the 30th charter with two guys.

It's at least around this weekend if nothing else that we get some cooler weather. It's not hard to forget about other "Florida vs. Georgia" football game weekend's in the past.

One that really stick in my mind was years ago with Wayne S. and his family from over off Hecksher drive. We departed early on a rising tide, and a N.E. wind blowing about 20 knots.

A big time K.O.D. kinda day.

The tide was coming up so fast that everything was underwater. It was freezing cold too, as I ripped up the river and into Mill Cove, where we tossed nothing but popping corks with 1/8th oz jigs and shrimp under them, and "BOXED" something like 20 trout, 4 Reds, 2 Sheepshead, and 5 Flounder, and 12 Black Drum, and released another 82 fish!!!!!!!!!!

Now that was my kind of "Florida vs. Georgia", kind of weekend!!