| Choupique |
04-28-2010 10:47 PM |
No problem fellas, I have been getting the Brandon/Brendan mix up for 30 some odd years now and don’t think it will ever stop! and thanks again for the kind words! Brandon appreciated them! lol
Here are some details from the weekend if you guys are interested.
Strong south/west winds pushed in the two days before the event, and the area got some gusts in the low 60mph range Friday night. Saturday the Redfish Tour tour was delayed till Sunday with our event. Water was really dirty almost everywhere near the coast. We had our fishing time cut an hour due to the double weigh-ins that day, but an hour didn’t make us change our game plan.
Me and my buddy Danny been doing a little scouting off and a week or so up to the tournament. I found a good mess of decent specks (for Cocodrie area standards mind you! lol) the weekend before and they were still in the exact same spot feeding on the exact same bait (baby pogies) that they were the previous week for the tournament. Luckily this area was a dead end canal, so it was still producing for the tournament even though we didn’t pay it a visit for 4 days prior to the event.
When we first starting looking for spots we looked back to our fishing logs from the past five years and concentrated on areas that were producing trout in March as this year our patterns are pushed back about a month from the norm due the the unseasonably cold winter. After that is was just a game of match the hatch. The small MirrOdine fit in perfectly with the schools of Pogie Fry while they were near the surface and we had trout on constantly on for the first 45 minutes or so.
All week my buddy was on some nice reds but the wind knocked out those areas and we went in blind on redfish after we secured the trout early. I had my biggest trout on the 3rd cast, and after a few more I had a feeling finding a bigger one was going to be a tall order. So off we went off in search of clean water up in the duck ponds to find redfish; At this point we were thinking we were thinking culling marsh reds would be more productive than fishing the usual locations for bulls and possibly scratching. TTF killer flats minnow in smokey joe on an 1/8oz head was the hot bait, and caught 12 reds for me to pick through. The small profile, dark natural color, and motion the KFM packs with its soft tail was great for turning the heads of those bronze backs while the fry run is on strong.
The weather ended up being a blessing and a curse. It made the fish we had all the more rare that day, but hurt us in finding the bigger fish we had worked hard at locating while the conditions were better. Sometimes you got to take what you get and hope for the best! It ended up working out for us. I took 1st, Danny took 6th.
Looking forward to seeing some of you guys at Empire!
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