Summertime fishing = Snook up-top early, reds and trout later

Well I really enjoy summertime fishing but it requires an early wake up call and it's pretty much done by lunch since the water gets hot and the thunderstorms usually are starting to fire up pretty early.  So with those caveats, John and Lindsay joined me a Cockroach the other morning on an incoming early morning tide.  We started off looking for big snook with topwater which I think is one of my favorite things in the world to do.  Well it didn't take us very long after getting on the trolling motor to find some fish.  I started pretty quickly by having a nice blow up and miss only to have it get slammed again and after a brief fight I ended up pulling the hooks.  I figure it was a nice red since it missed the plug on the first swipe and it stayed down deep.  We kept following the tide around the mangroves edges making long casts and we had a couple of blow ups and caught a few small jacks.  We got up to one point in some skinny water with a lot of current and I had a huge blow up about 15 ft off the mangroves.  Instantly I knew it was a big fish.  She came out of the water and it was a rather large snook.  It jumped quite a few times and I had her rolling over and was trying to at least get her away from the mangroves and back closer to the boat and the hooks just pulled.  I guess I just put a little to much pressure and that was that.  The boat estimate was 35+ inches so she would have looked great in some pictures but now she can just keep getting bigger in our imaginations!  We set up shop there for a few minutes and John ended up with a smaller red from behind the mangroves.  We worked our way around the corners and current flows of the mangroves looking for some more and although we had some more blow ups we were unable to find any to bring into the boat.

We then put the big motor down and put-putted back to some of my summer redfish holes that I've been fishing for a few years now.  Well the holes didn't disappoint. 

We started off with a nice red on a free lined shrimp.  The bite was kinda slow with the warmer water but the were eating!  We caught a couple more from our first position but I thought they might be a little further around the corner as the current picked up.  So after a quick re-position of the boat we were back on them again.

We caught fish on every presentation - freelined shrimp, shrimp tipped jigs and under a cork.  We even had a double.

Look at the spots!

As that bite slowed we moved down to a cut in the mangroves and it wasn't long before we found fish there as well.  I lost one literally on the first float.  Then we kept working and ended up with quite a few more reds, trout and mangrove snapper.

Watch Lindsay's move on the next video to get out of the mangroves on the right side about half way through the fight.  Another double to boot. 

We had a pretty good time catching fish today and as the tide dying, the summer heat warming everything up and running out of shrimp we decided to call it a day and head back to the launch.  I was able to get some pretty good video as well so enjoy cause we sure did on the water.