Hot bite in Myakka River State Park

The freshwater fly rods and my casting arm got a great workout on Tuesday while fishing for panfish in the confines of Myakka River State Park. Myself and friend Steve Gibson of Southern Drawl Kayak Fishing each had 100+ fish days, and that's a pretty conservative estimate. 

Most fish caught were 6-8" bluegill, with a few surprises thrown in. Speckled perch, tilapia, largemouth bass, and shellcracker all made appearances throughout the day. Hot flies were bead head nymphs fished under strike indicators, Myakka Minnows, and poppers in various sizes and colors. 

The fall is my favorite time of the year to fish, and I can't wait to see what the next few trips bring!

I'm still alive and fishing

Haven't had many worthwhile days of fishing to report about lately. Hoping to change that tomorrow with some bluegill on the fly at Lake Manatee. I'm all rigged up and ready to go, with a full fly box to boot...

Beaching it

The wife, dog and I took a quick stroll on the beach to test out my new stripping basket. I got about half an hour of fishing in before the rains rolled in. Using a freshly tied DT special I managed a trout and a snook in short order. The basket worked great and made line management a breeze. Looking forward to using it pretty frequently the rest of this summer!

DIY Stripping Basket

With beach fishing season in full swing I found myself wanting to develop a line management system to utilize while stalking SWFL snook. I usually make a few casts and let the line play naturally around my feet. For lack of a better term, this kind of sucks when I decide to move a few clicks down the shoreline as the line either has to: 

A) All get back into the reel, making my next cast have to start from scratch

Or 

B) Get tangled around my feet and make me shout unwarranted obsceneties at the sky

Neither of these scenarios make for efficient fishing. If only I had a container that could not only keep my line off the sand and out of the waves but also in an easy to cast and untangled clump. 

Introduce my stripping basket. While I have seen many take advantage of a waste-basket uncomfortably affixed around the waist...  or some other form of line collecting device such as Carbon Marine's "line lair" which affixes to the deck of a boat and has protruding appendages to keep like from tangling... I haven't yet seen something to accommodate beach fishing where you don't have a deck to let line play out on.

Zip ties, a military belt and an Ikea FÖRSIKTIG children's stool all come together with a little ingenuity to create my fly line containment device. The contour of the Ikea children's stool keeps the basket snug to my waste and makes it easy to keep line close to my body and ready for the next cast. Walking down the beach is a breeze with this tool. I drilled a few holes in a pattern to keep the zip ties in check and create a table for the line to play out naturally in to, and have not had any problems yet.

Hopefully you can use this simple less than $15 project to help you in your beach fishing pursuits! Until next time keep those lines tight and those rods bent!

Dock Light Snook Flies

Spent some time during all this rain getting my boxes ready for some summertime docklight snook fishing. While I keep Gibby's DT Special variations and Norm's Crystal Schminnows in good supply for most of my beach and dock light fishing, I decided to try tying some different patterns to see if I have any success.

The pattern on the left is my interpretation of a very basic UV Polar minnow. A video on how to tie this simple pattern can be found here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgIlVIBTAp0

The pattern on the right is known as a BSF (big snook fly/Borski shrimp fly). A step by step article can be found here:

http://www.microskiff.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1332636814

Hopefully this rain subsides quickly so I can put these flies to the test!

Evening bassin

One thing I have always enjoyed is hitting up local canals for bass on summer evenings when the afternoon storms settle down. It's a relaxing change of pace from a 6-8 hour kayak trip. When the weather gets hot, day time kayak trips become almost cumbersome. Often times I will fish for snook in the surf in the morning and follow it up with a pond or canal bass night cap, leaving the kayaks at home.

 I recently got a couple of cheap bags of bass worms and have started putting them to good use, this two-pound fish came out of a canal in my neighborhood.

I had the worm rigged weedless on a weighted hook. It hit on the fall before the worm even hit bottom. I caught 4 more, all the others came in right around a pound. I just picked up some bullet weights and Trokar worm hooks to start fishing a true Texas rig next time I go out. Hopefully I can get a couple 5 pounders this summer!

Finally, some fishing!

Life has kept me off the water for the last two weeks so it was nice that all the stars lined up enough to let me chase some fly rod snook along the beach this morning. Hoping to get 3-4 fishing trips in this week so look for a couple of posts soon!