Big Uglies

With a favorable weather outlook, I went back to the coast this past weekend to look for big redfish. Winds were acceptable for most the day and water clarity was pretty good, but the tide was up, and with the South wind, it increased water levels even more than normal where I was at, making it a little tough to sight fish. I didn’t see too many redfish throughout the day and those that I did see were not very aggressive to the fly. So all that adds up to a pretty unproductive day for me on reds.

Morning was a little frustrating, but I eventually came upon a large amount of big black drum. They were a little more willing to take a fly, though I did have to basically feed it to them. I caught three of them, one at 35″ and two at 37″ (one being 27lbs and the other 29lbs). You would think fish of this size would fight pretty hard, but only one gave me a good run. The other two were basically just dead weight on the end of my fly rod once I hooked them. To be fair, I was trying out a new Echo Carbon 10wt that seemed to whip them pretty good. I did enjoy using that new rod this past weekend, I hope to be able to use it more in the future on bull reds and other hard fighting offshore species.

I did get the redfish skunk off in a canal heading back to the launch (go figure). It was a tough day at the start, not a whole lot of action overall, but thanks to some big uglies, the day was saved.