After a few days at the conference, I took the morning to fish the with another person I met on a fishing forum. Jason has the boat docked at Thunderbolt and we were going to fish Warsaw sound. The targets today were redfish with a chance for speckled seatrout.
It was high tide when we started at 9am, but the tide will be moving out after. We started fishing creek mouths with live shrimp ($20/quart). At the first creek mouth, the fish weren’t around…but I did had a 2 foot shark pulled my popping cork down, then sawed off half the shrimp and took off. We checked out two other creek mouths and found nothing. Each of them had some bait around but it didn’t seem like the fish were there. Maybe it was the dolphins that were around. Jason said they hunt redfish.
Finally, at the fourth creek mouth, something pulled my popping cork down right by some sea grass and it turned out to be a 12” red drum (Sciaenops ocellata).
After that fish, I cast right back to the same spot and it was a 10” spotted seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus)!
Then the cast after…another 12” red drum!
After those three fish, that was it for the spot. So Jason suggested to try a spot called Salt Pond. When we got there, Jason asked whether I wanted to fish the left side or the right side. He said the right said has oyster rakes…so that was easy. Oyster rakes mean redfish hunting areas.
On the first cast, the popping cork came down fast…and it was a redfish. And the next 1.5 hours went like this…cast…redfish…cast…redfish…it was either Jason or I with a fish on constantly…and a few times, it was triple headers. I even tried taking a video but the action was too fast and before I can cast then aim and press the shutter button on the camera, the popping cork had already disappeared.
We also caught a couple of other species.
11” pigfish…a species of grunt (Orthopristis chrysoptera)
10” spottail pinfish (Diplodus holbrooki)
Before we left, Jason caught the biggest redfish of the day at 18” long.
I also landed my biggest of the day at about 15”
One of the luxury boats in a ship yard for some maintenance work.
In total, we both landed double digit number of redfish. It was just unreal! Jason said it was the best day of fishing for him and he said I was lucky. He said anytime I’m back in Savannah to give him a call and he’d be more than happy to take me fishing again. Thanks Jason! It was lots of fun. At 2pm, I made it back to the hotel for the afternoon seminar sessions. There was a huge smile on my face that I just couldn’t wipe off
Oh yeah…while we were fishing, the gnats were thick in the marsh…and we didn’t have any bug spray. This was just one hand…make sure you have bug spray when you fish the marsh!!!
In the evening, I took a walk down River Street which is part of the historical areas of Savannah. Here are some pictures.
Olympic Flame statue
Some pictures of River Street
Apparently Savannah’s best candy shop.
Old technology meets new technology. The boat is Savannah Queen and we had a conference event on it one evening.
Hm…I think I found a T-shirt that describes me perfectly.
