What’s up, fellow fishin’ nerds?

This week I had a good buddy of mine in town from Tennessee that wanted to try out inshore saltwater fishing. My goal was to start off in the early afternoon fishing near rocks n docks between Dragon Pointe and the Eau Gallie River. We fished everything from dead shrimp, to live mullet, live croakers and finally artificial lures. I was hoping to put SuperDuperHooper onto as many different kinds of fish as possible, while hopefully also learning some fishing basics during our trip.

First bait we rigged up was some frozen shrimp, I was hoping to knock out some hard fighting mangrove snapper near some rocks. I’ve noticed they are not usually as picky when it comes to what time of day it is when eating. Instead, I luckily caught the only catfish of the evening, and he was whacked by a small jack crevalle that put up a good fight for his first fish. Sticking to a strict “We are only staying at this spot for 20 minutes or less, unless this bite is hot” motto, we moved to a few spots inside the Eau Gallie River. After a hot lap around the river, we didn’t see any tarpon or snook activity, but we did managed to catch a couple Pokemon from the boat on the way out by Ballard Park. Who knew?

After a slow start, I decided to make a run towards Crane Creek. I’ve driven the boat through here a few times but haven’t really fished the area, so I decided now would be a good time to use the live bait. Using a couple Map apps such as Fishing Points, I found a mangrove line that had a dock and a deeper water nearby. I started him out with a finger mullet, on 3/0 circle hook and a float. Within a couple minutes we were hooked up on a good fish, after a few aerobatic flips we could see it was a decent sized snook. The first fish came off the boat side, so I re-rigged his pole, this time with a live croaker, and within seconds it was inhaled by something big. One thing I like about floats, is that people who don’t normally fish love to watch the bait swim around and in this case while the fish takes off, screaming drag. After a quick battle, and a huge bucketmouth flaring at the surface, we could see he had hooked in to a nice snook. Once we got the fish into the boat, she measured at 27 inches. After a couple quick pics, the snook recovered and swam off quickly.

Down to our last couple of baits, we decided to stick with the mission of trying to catch a wide variety of saltwater species, so we moved into the interior of Crane Creek. I did not see any tarpon rolling in the marina but between the US1 and railroad bridge there was a lot of activity. I saw right away a couple of small sharks waking at the surface, and a few smaller tarpon rolling. We only had large white mullet left for bait but we tossed out and gave it a shot anyways. After a while there was one big dawg tarpon rolling around, but none of the tarpon seemed interested as I believe they were feeding on smaller fry. We did however before leaving the area hook into a small shark but immediately broke us off.

As the sun was beginning to set we decided to make a run back to the dock before it got completely dark. My buddy has only been freshwater bass fishing and offshore saltwater fishing before but told me it was one of the best trips he had. We didn’t get the variety that I was hoping for but he caught some hard fighting fish, and was intrigued by the variety of wildlife. He was also pumped on how you could catch Pokemon and fish in the same areas lol. Afterwards we celebrated by ordering as much food as possible at Salty Fox such as pizza rolls, buffalo chicken dip, and tacos. It always feels good to kick back with friends and celebrate after a long day on the water.

Spanky