Sunday Oct 26th Deborah and I decided to take our friend Joe’s boat out. It has been having issues with the Minn Tokka Troller GPS spot lock. I think it has power issues and further testing should pin point that. The water is a little rough so we wanted to stay close and just around the El JoeBean bridge. The fishing forecast was really poor.
I wanted to get out anyway. The weather was nice and sitting around the house is not for me. The after major time started about 3pm so we stopped at the bait shop and bought only 2 dozen shrimp. The amount was decided based on the low percent day assuming there would be no action. Of course we brought cut bait as well.
About 3pm we hit the water. The first problem already appeared. The live wells are not working. The water was not pumping and I have live shrimp in my bait bucket. Being a quick thinker I dumped my bucket into the live well, added more water and placed my battery powered aerator in the well. It worked for the night.
Now off to South Gulf Cove lock to look for other live bait and start fishing.
We didn’t spot any bait pods. I had thrown a little chum out in a bag but nothing came. We started fishing with shrimp and right away I was catching small sail cats. I did get one spanish mackerel too. We decided to go out to entrance from the river at marker 4. There we saw the birds diving in for fish. There were schools of mackerel here and the water was boiling. These are fun fish to catch since they jump out the water a lot when hooked.
Suddenly we heard what sounded like a small prop plane real close. We looked for it but nothing appeared. After a few minutes we spotted the airboat! An airboat had passed through the lock and came out into the Myaka river. We think they were testing it because it stopped along the shore for a minute then continued west. Almost out of shrimp we headed back to the bridge to fish for a bit at night for snook. More mackerel were there now on the east side of the bridge. I anchored the boat and we used up the shrimp catching more of these fish and some cats as well. We didn’t keep any cats and only a few large macks. I have no idea what they taste like.
We had run out of live shrimp so Deborah wanted to try a swim bait type lure. Right away the mackerel were hitting it. I started using cut bait with a float but no action was received on that. It was now dark. We started seeing large splashes in the water near us. I’m at the back of the boat and Deborah is casting with that lure in the front. All of sudden I hear this loud high pitched noise. “What is that?” It was Deborah’s reel running super fast! She had a very nice 3000 series Tsunami Evict reel.
- Reel Material: Aluminum
- Maximum Drag: 15 lbs
- Braid Line Capacity: 150/15 yds/lb
Something broke once the fish jumped out of the water. Here lure had snapped in half. Lesson learned. Don’t use cheap lures for big fish.
We are still learning how to fish this area and getting better every time out. I hope to be posting big catches soon. Sorry to disappoint you this time.
Author: Chris Marx