4/20 & 21 - Working the flood tides

Did some R&D on Wednesday the 20th and between Chris aka: "Shaggy", and I we boated 2 Trout to 18-12 inches and a pup Red on the float-rigs......NOT GOOD! The incoming tide has just shut down the float-rig fishing for some reason.

My gawd, isn't this April? We fished from the jetties to Ft. Caroline.

You certainly don't want me to show you photos of years past from exactly this time of year. Hell, it was April 28th 2008 when I caught my first 10 pound Trout, just inside the jetties. Along with a 3 and 5 pounder off one spot!! In three drifts of my float!!

Besides snagging 3 Manta Rays on the frist of the falling tide. We also managed one pup Drum and a Whiting before calling it quits.

Today, I had Mike M. aboard. We discussed our options and decided to go see if we could catch some Pogies, fill up the chum chopper and make some drifts out in the SE hole area. Well, there was no pogies around close. And when we finally did find some in 20' of water just north of the Jax Beach Pier, they were ultra small and really scattered. We saw some, but we didn't catch any!

So after wasting the morning we went back to the big rocks and bottom fished. Two pup Black Drum, lots of seabass and a few bluefish later, I look and the pogies are in balls on the north side of the north jetty swimming right past us. Pushed by the very strong flood tide.

We dropped everything. I had Mike run the boat with me on the bow and made a cast on to the big ball of bait. The net floated and started to swim away full of pogies. I made another cast and we had almost two 5 gallon buckets full.

One bucket went into my new chum chopper welded into the stern platform. We saw the pogies getting pushed from up along Ft. George beach toward the south. So we ran north and cut the motor and started the chum slick. I rigged Mike with a big Owner long shank hook on a piece of wire, and rigged on a Pogie. I came up with a quick dead bait single hook rig with a way to wire a Pogie on, while sitting in my tackle room last week. And it works great. I'm all about one big hook versus those small trebles any day for drift fishing. And I rigged up a jig and squid for myself on a casting outfit. ALL....just incase "Mr. Cob" does swim up to the boat.

The Pogie pods were full of big Cuda's circling them. If Cuda's were Cobia we would have been in like flynn. So I dumped 3/4 of a 5 gallon bucket into my new Aussie style "burley bucket" (that's what they call it down there in Australia). And made this short video.

Other than that, Mike was a bit queezy after getting a huge wiff of them Pogies. Too me, those Pogies smell like summer time.

Heat, Pogies, Sun burn, being completely covered in salt......yeah it's summer alright!