A Great Trip In A New Location
Capt. Butch Rickey
February 9, 2011
Englewood - Saltwater Fishing Report
I had two trips on the books for this week, but one was lost when my customer had to fly back home to deal with a furnace issue. The second trip came Friday, up in Englewood. I hadn't fished Lemon Bay in decades, and had not fished the water I selected for this trip, ever.
Prior to the trip I did much research using Google Earth. I looked the whole area over looking for the kind of cover I like to fish. I settled on one of the local creeks that had a launch right on Placida Road next to the creek. I was there more than a half hour early to get the boats ready, and my customer Dan Yeomans, of Greenville, Ohio, was only a couple of minutes behind me.
I already knew from talking back and forth with Dan, he was an easy going guy, and very likeable. As the morning approached, I knew we'd have a southerly wind and some overcast, and we had a good tide. I told Dan the fish ought to eat.
The tide was still going out as we left the ramp. I would turn around at around 9 AM, and be coming in for the rest of our day. But, for the first couple hours we would not have a lot of water to fish. I needed to find some potholes, which would theoretically be full of nice winter trout and maybe some redfish. But for the first hour or so we came up dry on potholes, and caught one redfish. Moving off to a bit deeper water I finally found the potholes I was looking for. That proved to be the ticket for some trout action. We caught trout from 13 to 20 inches, and put a couple on the stringer for dinner.
As the water continued to rise the potholes eventually turned off, as they always will. We decided to check out an area that I had scoped out on Google. We trolled our jigs as we traveled on our trolling motors, and I caught a first; a whiting on a jig. He joined the trout on the stringer.
But, by now the traffic in this narrow bay was quite heavy, and there were lots of big cruisers running back and forth throwing big wakes our way. We also had a breeze around 15, that was adding to the chop. We fished one oyster bar with no strikes, and I decided to head back to more sheltered waters at the creek for the sake of safety.
We fished as we went, and were soon into action. We caught snook and redfish at each spot we stopped to fish. Dan caught a couple of redfish, and I caught another. But, the snook action was the real surprise. As we fished our way along Dan and I put 14 snook into our kayaks. They ran from first and second year juveniles to 26", and it was good to see the juvies. I had many snook follow my jig right to the end of my rod and strike it as I was lifting it out of the water to cast, again. I also had one nice snook cut me off, probably on the oyster cluttered bottom. And, caught one small snook on a topwater plug. Dan I think, had similar experience, and lost a nice fish right toward the end of the day.
Predictably, the action stopped as if a switch had been flipped as the tide came grinding to a halt. It was time to head in, but we did so with smiles on our faces. We had managed to stay on action for nearly all the day and had finished with 14 or so trout, 14 snook, 4 redfish, and the whiting. Dan was pleased, and so was I. It had been a beautiful day, the chance of rain held off, and we caught plenty of fish. What more could we ask?
Englewood Fishing Forecast:
Good if the weather behaves.
Target Species:
The SLAM!
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