by Keith Lozott, Contributing Writer
Having good fishing buddies to fish with time after time is something to be cherished and not taken for granted. Think about the stories you share, the fish you catch, and the quality time spent with buddies on the water that can’t be matched anywhere else. You never know when someone has to move for work, or another must leave for family reasons, or you just don’t have the time to fish as much as you’d like based.
This certainly has been the case with a few of my old fishing partners from Central Florida. We always talk about fishing for kingfish, cobia, tarpon, and much more out of Port Canaveral, but really haven’t had the opportunity to catch up as much as we’d like. Last month offered a window to meet in Sebastian to fish the river for trout, redfish and anything else that would bite a soft plastic lure, topwater plug or our favorite lure the Exude D.A.R.T. (Soft Plastic if you’re not familiar). We had a couple solid reports from my buddie’s boat mechanic that the trout were all over Snag Harbour area, which has seriously produced for me in the past. We cruised down a leeward shoreline that had some depth on the trolling motor, and the third or fourth cast Bill hooked up a small redfish on a D.A.R.T. The skunk was off early, but the water ahead looked promising. We kept tossing lures near the mangroves and reeling at slow to mid speed with a jigging action to the retrieve; when I say the trout were thick that was an understatement. We hooked up at least 20 nice trout between the three of us on the 300 yards of shoreline we fished. It may have been better if we didn’t have dolphins working the shoreline with us. Typically, we would’ve moved on from the dolphin, but the bite was hot, we shared the good fishing with them. We were careful to release the trout when the dolphins were far enough away to not come eat the tired fish.
We decided to make only one pass on that shoreline and give the fish a break to recover and hide from the dolphins. I had fished the opposite shoreline in the past with very good success catching sizable trout and then redfish once the bottom contour changed to suit the red’s lifestyle. This time the shoreline was in the wind which produced one of the biggest trout I’ve ever caught. Bait gets pushed into the windy shorelines and cause predatory fish to hunker down in these areas waiting to crush an unsuspecting baitfish. Again, maybe two or three casts and it was on! A nice sized seatrout was buttoned up, landed and released adding to the count. I noticed that the size of the trout were much bigger than the leeward side of the mangroves. We cruised down this shoreline one time and caught eight or so trout and spooked a couple huge snook laying on the bottom.
By this time the day was coming to an end and I had to get back home to get my daughter from school. The moral of the story is, make time even when you’re pressed for it to fish with good friends and experience the camaraderie a day on the water offers.