Where dey at doe?

I saw a good weekend day to go fishing a couple weekends back and pounced on it.  The weather looked pretty cooperative and usually if you can catch mild weather in the winter luck will be on your side.  I woke up early and got on the water shortly after sunrise.

It was a chilly start, but I knew the day would warm up so I wasn’t too bothered by the cold.  Besides, the winds were light and the clouds were nowhere to be seen, it was looking like it could be a pretty good day to sight fish.

The tide was low, which is normally not a bad thing for sight fishing, however this tide was extremely low.  This extreme low had the water pretty dirty.  I knew it was low when I launched, but I didn’t realize that it would continue to fall throughout the morning.  There were entire flats that were exposed that I’ve never seen exposed.  The fish were nowhere to be seen and even when I did see them it was too late for me to make a cast.  Fishing was tough.

I did manage to avoid a skunk though.  Right around lunch I had made my way to a flat where I’ve always found fish.  It is off of a deep canal, so even if the flat was mostly exposed, there was still some refuge that could be taken in the canal for the fish.  Sure enough that’s where they were.  There were a handful of big black drum (they looked white in the water) with their tails up in the canal.  I moved into position and dropped my fly in the path of one of them and he vacuumed it up.  The fight was on.

It was a hefty fish.  It gave me a couple of good strong runs and put a solid bend in the old TFO Mini Mag.  The drum was a square, nearly as heavy as it was long (35 lbs, 37 in. long).  It was a fun catch and I was glad to have caught something, even if it did slime up the boat and my pants.

After that I tried to make my way through the marsh back to the launch, but without any water it was futile.  I headed back the way I came, through the bay, and ran into Scott from Bayou Chronicles and his neighbor on the paddle back.  We chatted and fished for a bit.  He ended up catching a beast of a redfish later in the day as I was already loading up the boat to head home.  The tide was coming back in after lunch and if  I were patient enough I probably would have had better opportunities at redfish in the afternoon.  It had been a long day on the water for me though and I packed it in.  There’s always next time I guess.