Life Outside Field Development: Jan Fishing with Doc

Got out and fished with Dr. Schuster on a low tide Jan. morning on the South Shore of Tampa Bay. We followed the path that John and I blazed the other morning with a little more purpose and a better idea about where we wanted to fish so we didn't waste much time getting some early morning action. After launching at EG we ran down to the Roach to fish some open flats on the falling tide before the switch. We found some pot holes with some redfish pretty quickly and had the cooler loaded with dinner at the first stop.

The bite shut down so we ran back closer to the launch to catch up with the tide and at first I thought we had made a bad decision but we rewarded with some scattered fish around some pot holes though the tide was a little higher than we really needed. One memorable fish came on a crunched shrimp over a pot hole, as it swirled and missed the shrimp on the first pass the red hammered it after I stopped it and and it fell into the sand.

We had a quick lunch and tried a couple more pot holes but noticed the tide was pretty high for the area we were fishing 2+ ft (seems like a lot of water but not for these fish). So we had some room to explore for a little while with some moving water so we headed in a direction that I hadn't gone looking for some structure a little closer to the mangroves. We figured that the fish that were on the flats might be moving to structure a little closer in. After getting no bites in a sand hole closer to the mangroves we noticed a sand hole that ran out from the mangroves into the grass that looked like it could hold some fish. Well it did...

We stopped counting at the number of redfish we pulled out of that hole but below are some pictures and some video. If you put a shrimp into the sand it would get picked up almost as soon as it hit the water.