Corpusfishing.com

[Hoggeman]

We went down to the cut at the 60MM on Wednesday. The winds were cooking up to 40 miles an hour so we put out some cut bait and went to bed. In the morning the winds had died to 25 miles an hour and people were fishing in the channel with great success. Top waters, morning glory and gold spoons caught the reds that were feeding with the tide. We were down early to scout the beach and try to find a nice hole to set up camp. We stopped at 53MM and fished for 30 minute no luck, we looked at the 39MM, 38MM, 33MM 31MM stopping at the 29MM.


We saw birds, signs of mullet and a double pinch point. We cast cut bait and fresh dead into the deep wade gut and started to catch slot reds while we set up camp.









I swam out a stingray on a 9OT to the backside of the second gut it was too rough to kayak. When we had limited out on reds, we went to bed. We had no runs on the shark bait by 6 AM so we went to the sign in.



After signing in and making an ice & fuel run we made it back to camp around 10:30 AM. I started to prep a 16 OT and two 14 OT’s with Jack Fish, after flipping two times in the kayak I went old school again and swam them out to the back side of the second and third.





I fished the wade gut and picked up two slot reds and decided to up the size of mullet I was using. After dark I set up my up-riggers and moved the big rigs closer to where I was sleeping. At 2:30 I woke to a screaming 14 OT the line was stripping so fast and hard I did recognize the sound right away, then when I did I thought a truck had run through my line. By the time I got out of my truck where I was sleeping over 400 more yards of line was out and still going strong. I had to kick the PVC to get the pole out and as I set the hook the 100 # test line broke and the screaming stopped. As I wound in the broken line for 10 minutes as it started to rain so hard I could not see the end of my pole. I was too wet to get back in the truck so I sat under the lean too and drank a beer and try to figure out what went wrong. When I back off on the drag on that particular reel it is still too much drag that early in the fight and Nick from breakaway said it might have been my first encounter with a Mako because of the pure speed of the reel taking off. We had no more runs the second night and I was able to successfully catch and release four slot reds and take home a limit that we caught before the tournament started. We had a great time and are looking forward to next year.
Hoggeman
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Fin in the wind