LLM Back on Track!

Its been nearly two months since I last posted on my blog. Since then we've traveled to Europe and had a fantastic tour. I never thought I would want to go to Europe, but it was well worth the money. Turkey was our favorite. The people, food, and sights were great.
Now fishing. The key is bait! If you can find the bait you can find fish. The patterns have been totally different from years past. In the past if you found fish in a particular area one day, they were usually there for a period of time. Our experience so far in June has been that if the bait is there, then the fish are near. But one morning there may be tons of bait on a bar and then the next morning...nada!
I've been finding that the topwater bite has been early and then the fish are going deep. The temperatures down here have been extreme for June. Fishing plastics slow with dropping action seems to work best. I've been wading deep flats...chest deep and finding good fish in the deeper drop offs.
We've had exceptionally high tides in June and a number of our usual wading areas are much deeper. If I go with the short boys they have trouble getting into some of the areas I fish.
I am usually not a live bait person, but one of the local guides, we'll call him TC, fishes a lot of croaker and does real well on big trout. I've started securing pinfish and have found them to work fairly well in the deep holes around the causeway. I need to start fishing the potholes in the flats with the pinfish, but something always draws me back to my topwater when I'm in shallow water!
Tomorrow is the 4th of July and I hope it finds you at your favorite fishing spot for a little while before the fireworks. Remember to go and worship on Sunday.

Take care!

HOT!HOT!HOT!

The weather that is. The fishing according to all the local guides is "on fire" right now. The truth is there are "dinks" everywhere. Its no big deal to go out and catch 40-50 trout...all in the 13-14 inch range. Finding good trout is harder. A number of times in July I fished pinfish in the deep holes under both causeways and came away wondering if the Democrats had given all the trout away. Even finding good keeper trout on shrimp is hard. If you fish the dropoffs along the ICW you can usually bang out a limit or two. My experience lately has been if we bring in a single limit we are doing good.
The redfish are to be found, but it seems the same story...they're either 19 or 39inches, finding good keeper reds is hard. Most of ours are coming on gold spoons.
Now one exciting point is that we are taking some good snook in South Bay. Most are early on topwaters back in some parts of the bay that I am told that certain guides have "real estate deeds" to and would like to put up "POSTED/NO TRESPASSING" signs in. I've been checking out how one purchases this water!!
We have been catching a few really good trout by wading. The Long Bar flats have produced several 27inchers in July and the Brownsville Channel flats have given up a number of 24-26's.
Normally I don't fish in the late afternoons, but yesterday I got an itch and decided to wade a couple of hours on an outgoing tide. It was a good decision. In less than an hour I had a limit of 20-24's, all taken on Nortons. Maybe I'll be back there this afternoon!

Take care....see ya at the Doctors Tournament !