Corpusfishing.com

[Prof. Salt]

Well I decided to give my area a shot during duck season. The safest approach would be to stick to open bay shorelines early while listening to locate hunters. There were quite a few vehicles and trailers at the launch site, so I knew people would be scattered around the area. I just needed some shoreline to work until I could locate the hunters by sound to avoid those pockets. I started on an open but protected shoreline and did a mile and a half along this while hearing only two bursts of gunfire in the distance. It was still and ducks were not flying much. There were only a couple of small reds located on the way out, and the one I casted to was small enough that he didn't get the hook on the strike. When I hugged the other side of this open area to work back to the larger bay, I found some fish exposed and hunting. One red popped up as I was passing. He was 15 feet away and came out of the water chasing a shrimp along the grass. When the lure landed the fish turned to see what made the disturbance, and as I slowly pulled the craw lure in front of the fish it pounced. The return trip gave me six more shots at fish, and most came aboard for a photo. The majority of the fish were low slot sizes, but two were solid 25-26" fish and went into the box. I spotted a group of reds slashing a shoreline at the entrance to a slough, and as I got close they swam ahead of me along the shoreline. I switched rods to the paddle tail because it offered more reach. I got the bait ahead of the fish, and one slammed the bait right on cue. This was my second solid keeper. Thirty yards later I found a fish chasing shrimp along a grassy stretch. When I got the bait just ahead of the fish it turned to look and then bolted. As I got to the turning point I knew one group of hunters had been / might still be in a lake I usually hit, and the other group was farther away than I planned to explore. Near the mouth of the bay there is a shallow sandbar, and I got to watch a pair of dolphins hunting in water shallow enough to prevent them from submerging. They caused big wakes and darted ahead chasing fish and making a cool spectacle of themselves. As I passed wide of the occupied lake to go to a more distant target area, I spooked several sleeping drum. These were not the puppy drum I prefer, but were 27-37 inches or so and not what I was looking for, so I kept moving. As I approached the entrance to my big target lake, it was 9:30am and I hoped the hunters would be out already. A small skiff motored past me and started to turn into my lake, but he quickly turned back toward open water and kept moving to the next lake entrance. As I got to the connecting point, I could see why he had turned away. There was a large spread of decoys all through the entrance, making it impossible to get past without paddling through the middle of their spread. On the bright side, the tide was so low that mud was visible all across the lake behind the decoys, so it would not have been a fishing option anyway. I kept moving toward the other large lake, and the skiff had already stopped short of that entrance. As I got closer I could hear the trolling motor, propeller half in the water and half out, spluttering away as it tried to pull the little boat through the mud. The boater was determined to get in and I knew it would create enough noise to keep me from catching fish in that lake, so I kept moving along the open shoreline. I hoped to fish one more lake on the way back, but when I got there it was too shallow to get into that one as well. I counted the trip a success with two solid fish in the box and several more released. I was off the water by 10:00 and went home to deal with other projects.

[ziacatcher]

Glad you didn't get rained on by steel shot. Nice fish!

[awesum]

Staying on 'em ....