Tampa Fly fishing for red drum, again with the 3 amigos

Jan 4th 2009   

It was in the 30′s last night here in Tampa. This very very cold for us here in Tampa even for this time of  year. However with clear skies and low tides it was looking good to  do some sight fishing on sand flats. While drinking my cup of coffee this morning I started to text Tom(wanganchor) and Joe(carbonmarine) up. Both were running errands and on a conference call. But I knew  that they knew, that I knew that they knew… the conditions was calling to get some more fly fishing in. Everyone basically made up excuses to hit the water for a few hours.   

I gotta say for the first few hours we were highly disappointed. Basically there were no fish to be found. Perhaps it was the very cold water temperature we weren’t sure. All we knew was there just wasn’t any reds around to cast at. We did some running around and all we found were small sharks cruising the flats. The winds were picking up and it was pretty much time to pack it in.  We were also loosing sun light but we decided to give it one last spot suggested by Tom.   

We started out wading and I came across a floating redfish. I guess he was trying to get warmth because I’ve never seen that. I’ve seen snook do it but never a redfish.  I made the cast and I immediately hooked up to a 28″ redfish. Tom hooks up shortly and then Joe within 10 minutes of each other. Then it went dead again. I caught one smaller one later but that was it . A good day considering were about to walk away with skunks.   

As you can see we were using our homemade wading striping basket contraption described in this video. I tell you it works pretty well. 

 

btw: my loop Evotec worked just fine after the saltwater dunking I gave it a couple days a go. It’s a nice litte reel and not crazy expensive like some of the super high end ones. Seems to be holding up in the salt nicely.   

Photo note: Bad news is, I had crap on my lens if you look at the photos bottom right hand side. Good news is it didn’t really affect the photo much as it was off the subject.  All shot in program mode aka automatic mode. 

   

   

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