seatrout lagoon

This time of the year is the most exciting time to fish for me personally because I live in the south end of the Banana River and do not have to travel throughout the central Brevard IRL region to find awesome fish. Over the last two weeks, I’ve caught multiple trout over 20” inches, and lost just as many.. I’ve seen a few tarpons starting to show in the residential canals, we jumped a couple but both spit the hook. Also, it seems like both the white/striped mullet are appearing more frequently in my cast net.

Although there is a lot of positives this time of year in my area, there has been negative as well. Mostly water quality issues, only a few weeks ago I could see the bottom of the Banana River up to 3-4 feet throughout the south end, now it’s maybe 3-4 inches. The chocolate milk color, mixed in with what looks like oil sometimes, has been really disturbing. There is a road runoff/pipe from South Patrick Drive into my canal and the amount of trash and debris that has been coming in this summer is unbelievable. While listening to Capt. Ross’s “Catch A Memory” radio show, I heard that CCA will give students 30 mins of volunteer hours for every five-gallon bucket of trash picked up from the waterways. After being out on the water most of the summer, I’m hoping my students will jump on board with this program, as the hours are flexible to fit your schedule and our waterways badly need the help. For the rest of us, I believe you can enter every five-gallon bucket of trash to win prizes from, so I’m going to definitely jump on that. I’ve also seen some local news reports on social media of a pretty bad fish kill in the Cocoa Beach/Thousand Island area that included a few 40lb Reds. I’m starting to look online more and more for events that benefit our waterways such as Blair Wiggin’s RL Clam Project Banquet / Fundraiser on Oct 5th. I hear a lot of people talking about wanting to resolve the issue, but personally, I’m hoping to find out more ways to be more involved.

I usually have a video for you all, but my old man strength broke the micro sd card in half while going to edit the trout footage, so we will have to settle with photos this time. I’ve been spending most of the last week detailing the boat and rebuilding my personal dock. I’m looking forward to getting back out the water at the end of this week.