Last Updated on October 7, 2021 by Eric Bonneman
Today I had the Fitts brothers, Michael and Bradley aboard. We departed from the dock a little later in the morning and the water was almost as slick as glass. Our main target for the day was the great tasting Speckled Trout, but due to forecasted neap tide, the hopes for a red-hot trout beatdown wasn’t expected.
On our first stop, each cast produced Gaff Top catfish. After about 20 casts and 20 catfish later, we then made a run further south to an oyster reef that had birds diving on shrimp and current moving through.
We came in on the oyster reef from the upwind and up current side for a silent drift and it didn’t take long before a few very nice Speckled Trout started to come over the gunnel. There were quite a few undersize trout that were caught and released but each drift produced a few nice ones for the fish box. We repeated many drifts across the reef and managed to box a respectable number of very nice Speckled Trout till the bite completed died due to the tide topping out.
Switch gears! With the water being flat as glass and barely any tidal movement, it was time to run the crab trap floats and any structure that we could find floating on the surface of the water and search for some Tripletail.
It didn’t take long until we came across our first crab trap float that had a small triple tail nosed directly under its shadow. Bradley cast a live shrimp that was rigged about 1 foot below an oddball cork slightly past the crab float and slowly retrieved it to where, when paused, the shrimp would sink right by the Tripletails nose. Immediately there was that telltale subtle strike followed by a hookset. It was a short fight but Bradley just caught his first Tripletail ever!
For the next hour and a half, we ran and checked every bit of floating structure that we could find. Michael and Bradley caught and released numerous undersize Tripletail, missed two very nice ones and managed to put a fine 19 incher in the box!
As spring transitions to summer, the water temperatures will keep climbing and weather patterns become more predictable; the Tripletail fishing is soon to be off the chain!