A long walk on the beach

I made it back out to Johnson Beach a few days later and this time I decided to put some miles under my feet before I wet a line. There’s about 7 miles of beach I could cover in this section of the Gulf Islands National Seashore and so far I’d only fished the bay side. On this morning I decided I’d try and cover both the bay and the surf.

I got out there a little later than I probably should have as people were already beginning to line the side of the road, but I was still early enough to catch the sunrise and greet a fellow angler of the avian variety. He was a local so I didn’t have any beef with him being there before me.

I walked a couple of miles down the beach, stopping and casting around anything that broke up the homogenous sand flat. There really wasn’t much action going on in the surf. That’s not to say there wasn’t fish there, it just wasn’t happening for me. I decided to move to the bay side and try my luck on the grass flats there.

Eventually I made my way into a bay off of Big Lagoon proper and it was there that I began catching fish. The pinfish were in abundance at this spot and I caught several of them, this was one of the bigger ones I caught. It was also here that I saw a few different redfish. I never got a good cast off to any of them, but at least I saw some Florida redfish.

I waded along the edge of the bay and into a very shallow inlet tucked away that looked fishy and figured if I was going to catch a red it would be here. I did catch a fish along the edge of the spartina, but it was small, a longnose killifish as I’d come to learn.

I was still throwing a charlie with a nymph trailer as there were a lot of smaller fish around. In the back of this inlet though was a big fish lying still on the bottom, a nice sized gar. I had no idea the species as I was in brackish water and the only gar I knew that liked brackish water in Louisiana were alligator gar. This was no alligator gar as his snout was way to narrow. With research I found out that longnose gar are common in Perdido Bay so that’s what I assume this was. I made several casts running my charlie along the length of his body and finally managed to get him to follow and then swipe at it. Surprisingly I was hooked up!

The fight wasn’t all that glamorous, he made a few strong runs, but was easy to wear down with my drag. As he got closer I could see that there was some trauma to his upper mandible as the top part of his snout was missing! That may have played into the fight and why it was so easy to make a solid hookset. I brought him to hand, thanked him for coming in easily, popped my fly out, and sent him on his way. It was definitely a cool experience to catch a gar while wading a sand flat. The close combat fight was a thrill.

I exited the inlet and kept covering water in this bay, making sure to fish all the grass edges, deep troughs, and deeper shoreline spots I came across. This tactic landed me a pretty good sized cocahoe minnow (Gulf killifish), more pinfish, and the juvenile pigfish showed up again.

It was starting to get close to lunch time so I made my way back toward the surf to make some casts there while walking back to my car. While walking the beach I came across a massive conch (I assume) shell that was partially buried in the swash zone. It was the biggest I’ve ever seen.

It was a hell of a find and really made the day that much cooler. Not long after that I noticed a school of fish in the surf and after a few missed eats I got a solid hookup. After the first jump it was clear it was another ladyfish.

After a fun fight with some aerial acrobatics I got him to hand. The ladyfish was really the cherry on top of a pretty stellar morning! I kept walking and casting at fishy looking spots down the beach, but never hooked up with anything else or came across another solid school of fish like that.

After two mornings I had quite the mixed bag on Perdido Key and came away really enjoying the experience of fishing both the grass flats and the surf. It was totally different than the style of saltwater fishing I do in Louisiana which is typically from a kayak, purely out of necessity. If I could wade fish for reds in Louisiana I would absolutely prefer it to the kayak. There is something about covering ground and catching fish on my own two feet that I really appreciate.