Report...September 12, 2007

Running of the bulls!!! Bull redfish are now staged for their annual spawn. Schools are on the flats and in the river. Just in 3 days this week we've already caught 20 redfish over 30lbs, with a couple approaching the 50lb mark. It's EASY fishing with the right conditions and this should hopefully last through the first few weeks of October. I recently had a lucky angler from Texas catch another tagged redfish. Redfish in the 5-10lb range are flooding the shallow flats in and around New Smyrna Beach, Mosquito Lagoon, and the Indian River Lagoon. The water levels are up which has the fish scattered, but we’re catching a lot each day on fly, topwater plugs, soft plastics, and live bait. Tarpon fishing couldn’t be any better, well at least for asking for chances (there’s certainly no guarantees in hooking up or landing one of these silver kings). But we’re getting LOTS of chances every day, with most of these fish in the 80lb+ range. We’ve jumped nearly 50 tarpon this year (between 25-125lbs) aboard my boat. That’s a heck of an accomplishment for this area. If the condtions are right we can sight fish laid up tarpon on fly (we jumped 3 so far). But we've only got a few weeks left, then they'll be gone till next spring...I'm really going to miss fishing them. Speckled trout fishing is pretty good. Most of our caught fish are ranging from 4-7lbs, still a trophy catch for most clients but not like the 10lb dream fish. There’s snook are going off in the tidal areas, and we’ve done well sight fishing those too, as well as working plugs for them at first light. Right before school started up again, my son caught a rare snook on the flats of Mosquito Lagoon. Because there is basically no tide, snook aren’t really caught on the flats here. His 24” linesider was shadowing bait pods on a big open grass flat. Within the past few days, we’re spotting triple tail hanging out in the Lagoon, today I landed one on fly. Sharks are pretty active around the Inlet. We can sightfish them or we're catching them on bait.

A few weeks ago I hosted Dustin Miller from St. Augustine, for one of a few upcoming days he’ll be spending with me. He owns Flesh Profits Nothing, a video/film and photography studio here in Florida. Dustin makes documentaries, commercial, and takes amazing photos…he’s a full-time professional. You can visit his website at http://fleshprofitsnothing.com/ He’s a great guy and we’ve got some collaborative projects in the works. Seeing how the fishing is about as incredible as it’s going to get, we had to get started, NOW! The day before he was about to hop on a plane, Dustin met me for a morning of fishing in the Mosquito Lagoon. What god unveiled at daylight was nothing short of a once in a lifetime event. We literally were surrounded by nearly 500 redfish “crawling” on top of the grass flats. That was a safe estimate, we never moved more than 50 yards all morning and could see hundreds more on nearby flats. After taking nearly 300 pictures during the first 90 minutes, we decided it was time to finally catch some. Within 45 minutes I had landed a few fish on fly without even trying, I think I made 10 total casts. We then went back to watching this surreal display of fish that seemingly were in a trance, oblivious to anyone around them. We left them just as we found them, while we looked for some bigger bull reds. We found those too, and I invited one back to the boat for more pictures. We watched them for a while as they continued moving down the flat, only needing one to satisfy our desires. No greediness now, these fish are getting ready to spawn. Here are a just a few of the pictures Dustin captured. I can’t wait to see what happens on his next day out with me.

If you’re wondering whether or not now is a good time to fish, don’t delay. I’m back to doing 8 hour trips again now, as the fishing is staying pretty good throughout the early afternoon. Give me a call, some of the best fishing of the year will be taking place from now through early October. Don't miss it! 386-212-4931