We saw lots of fish and I had 2 eats. One was an upper slot red fish that tracked and ate the fly right in front of me. The other is was a line class record creek chub. Yes he actually ate it.
I also had a chance to cast Tom's 8wt Crowder fly rod. I gotta say, for a mid range rod with a life time warranty I was pretty impressed. It was very light, moderately fast, and had great components.
Sunday I was up at 5am to make a trip down to the Everglades with Jay Withers. Since he has never been down there I was the guide today. I've only been down there a couple times and really not an expert.
About 1/2 hour into the our run we realized we both did not bring and cutters or pliers. Anxious to fish we decided to improvised. We took the middle hook out of a lure and used it as a dehooker. Jay used his teeth to cut the line. Yes he probably took a couple years of enamel off his pearly whites. All I had on the boat was an adjustable wrench and we used that as our pliers. Since it was such a pain to change lures I used the Sebile Stick shad the entire day.
The 5 hours of the day was very tough. Not fishing there in quite a long time I had no idea where the fish would be staging. Fishing out front was out of the question as all the wind had the water dirty and mucky. We struggled to find any fish at all. In the 1st 5 hours all we yielded was 2 jacks and snook.
2pm we finally found them. Lots of snook and plenty of over the slot laid up floating momma snooks. We got 16 snook on the stick shad in 2 hours and had some great shots at the big girls. However every time we would make the cast the smaller more aggressive fish would get to the lure first.
By 4pm we had to make the long run back to the ramp. It was an excellent day considering the conditions of the high waters and pressure. Also the fact that it was my 1st trip there since spring. I will be back soon when it gets a bit colder so the snook will be moved back to cleaner and skinnier waters.
