I had the opportunity to fish with Dr. Schuster the other day and we had a great day out on the water at Fort De Soto. We started off early into a pretty breezy east-north-east wind which caused us some problems early on the incoming tide. We had lots of blow-ups on our top water but most fish seemed to just miss the plugs. It took us a while to start catching game fish as it seemed like the pinfish were extremely active. We also caught some mangroves on top-water as well which was new to me.
It took some time to find some trout but we finally got into them and some bigger fish a little deeper into the drift across the flat. We found some reds but weren't able to get them to bit so with the tide coming to a quick end we made our way out of the wind and into a more sheltered place in a mangrove enclosed area. I got up on the poling platform and worked our way down the mangrove shore line looking for fish and we found some fish during the slack water time but the just wouldn't bite. We saw some big reds and saw a very large group of big snook cruising up on the oyster bar that we would go back and target a little while later.
We decided to go check out a hole that I had found on google earth and when we got there we saw a bunch of mullet and started seeing quite a few nice redfish so we put the powerpole down and started blind casting into the broken water and in and around the mullet schools. It wasn't long before Dr. Schuster had on a nice red. Unfortunately, the knot broke and it came off right at the boat... Well we didn't catch anymore from that group and we never found them again so it was getting later in the day so we decided to pole one more time around the mangroves to sight fish a little while longer. Not to long into looking we started spotting fish but those fish were pretty spooky and very hard to see.
Our best fish of the day was a sheepshead which are usually pretty hard to catch but we fooled this one 5 feet from the boat. Dr. Schuster made a good cast to the laid up sheepshead and it chased down the shrimp but missed it on the first try. It was like that sheepshead had never eaten as Dr. Schuster killed the retrieve and the shrimp sank back down and the fish chased it down and killed it. After a brief fight around the back of the boat we had up in the boat for a quick look and back in the water.
Right around the next corner we came up on some oyster bars and saw a couple of larger fish moving up against the mangroves and Dr. Schuster made a good cast up to them as they swam towards us and both of the reds swam right over the shimp. He made another quick cast and as they turned down the mangroves and both of us were pretty sure one of them looked like it was heading towards the shrimp but about that time we see a fin hit the water right over the reds as a 3 to 4 ft. bonnet head must have come up from deeper water to investigate all the activity and ruined that for us.
From there we ended up spooking 10+ very large snook in groups of 2 or 3 every 50 to 100 ft down the mangrove line. Unfortunately, they were sitting in 3-4 of water about where I was poling the boat and they were very hard to see. Something I'm going to have to remember for that area and the location of where to cast too under those conditions. Good day on the water and we both learned a little bit about site casting and fish holding areas that we would normally float over.
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