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Went out at dawn to try and get Garrison his first redfish on a fly rod. Set up on a flat as the tide was coming close to dead low and pulling the redfish out of the grass. After breaking his first fish off, Garrison landed a nice three pound redfish in the face of some stiff winds. Used the Copperhead fly for most of the morning and the fish were receptive to it.
Left late in the morning for a midday trip with Dennis. Started with a few trout and smaller reds on shrimp under a cork and artificials. Went into the grass as the tide rose and picked up the nice 3 pounder pictured above. Finished the day casting to tailing reds at high tide.
David and Tammy joined me for a charter today while visiting Charleston for the weekend. A very high morning tide combined with wind that grew through the day until there were whitecaps on the rivers made for some challenging conditions. Nonetheless, they fished hard for six hours and caught redfish on blue crab as well as redfish and trout on a white jerk shad. Pictured above is the couple with Tammy’s 5 pound redfish.
Had a very productive charter today with a family group. Pat started us off well with the four pound flounder pictured above. We moved to a low tide spot and caught many redfish in the 5-7 pound range along with a good sized trout. Tim broke off a redfish and when we retied and went back we caught the same redfish with the lure we had just lost in its mouth! Finished the trip targeting and catching trout with shrimp under a popping cork and hooking up with an acrobatic ladyfish.
Spent the last week fly fishing on the Madison River in Southwest Montana. In early September, the Madison Valley is awash with grasshoppers and the river is full of trout happily eating grasshopper pattern flies. Our typical setup would be to tie a nymph dropper off of one of these big dry flies. The trip produced a nice mix of rainbow and brown trout while we enjoyed temps in the mid-80s during the day and cool weather at night. Dad caught his biggest Montana trout in several years when a rainbow ate his prince nymph dropper in the early evening. As always, a great yearly tradition.
Got lucky and found a pocket of dry weather this afternoon. The three gentlemen who joined me caught redfish, trout, flounder and shark. Live bait worked well but you could not keep the bait stealers away from the blue crab and live shrimp. Strips of cut mullet were able to last though and they produced the 6 pound red pictured above. The only thing that made that fisherman unhappy was when he learned it was too big to keep!
