After the hurricanes it seems we get more species of fish on the beach, including flounder, mangro, snapper, black drum, redfish, and now and then a nice snook. Did you ever notice when you’re fishing and going down the beach to say hello to a friend, you turn around and look back, that’s when your rod is going off crazy? Or when you’re back at your cart way down the way, that’s when your last pole will hit, and you have to run? Well, this happened to me this morning.I set up and didn’t get a hit for at least an hour. I walk down a few hundred yards to see my good friend Wyn, and he starts screaming at me. I turned around and my rod is bent in half! I started to run, slow speed (my only speed), then on to second gear, and I started feeling a pull in my calf. That slowed me up quite a bit. I crawled to my rod as it was about to launch into outer space. I’ve been fishing with crab, knuckles, and sand fleas. My best bait, my confidence bait.Whatever’s out there is taking line, and it hit on the crab, which to me means it’s a good fish taking line, going down the beach, giving me another chance to limp down the beach.Now the fish Is giving me Its best after almost spooling me. I clamped down on the drag a little bit to tighten it up, and this beautiful redfish swims in.It’s the season for redfish and I target them.
Ya mon! Sad to say that the sargassum seaweed is back with a vengeance. The ocean looks like Portuguese kale soup. A huge amount of the seaweed is piling up on the beaches coming from an island floating out in the Atlantic. I’ve written about this seaweed before. Here’s a little bit about what sargassum seaweed is:made up of plankton leafs, long vines, and accumulates all types of food on which the seabirds and larger fish feed. It’s been used inChinese medicine for centuries. In the Caribbean islands it’s used for fuel, burned to make jerk chicken and other delicacies. It mainly stays in shallow waters by reefs and hangs out mostly around Florida and the Caribbean islands. It is very hard to get rid of. It stinks when decomposing, letting off sulfuric and ammonia fumes. Needless to say, it stops everything, but we don’t let it get to us here on the beach in Wilbur By the Sea.Any day now, mysteriously, the sargassum will be pushed out to sea. With the hurricanes gone, this week anyway, and the end of hurricane season showing up asI write, the reggae sounds of Toots and the Maytals playing the song, ‘Pressure Drop,’is a proper way to spend the rest of the day.And you know me and these big, blackened redfish fillets are heading to the smoker.
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