dragon point tripletail

Spring Break, images of perfect Florida weather, sandbars, and perhaps an adult beverage or two. Instead, I found myself retying poles, replacing old hooks, and dreaming of getting out of the house. As a teacher, one of the few things that keeps me sane around this time of year is being out on the water, but it seems mother nature had other plans for this week. Just as the “winter” weather looked to be fading in the rearview mirror, it quickly felt like January again. Monday and Tuesday brought windy, rainy, and cold weather to our Space Coast. Wednesday was a tease, it appeared to be clearing up, but by the afternoon, it was back to rain and 15mph winds with high gusts. After coming home Wednesday from a full day of bank fishing all around Merritt Island and Port Canaveral, no catches, and a lot of lost tackle. I needed a win.

Waking up Thursday, I connected the boat to the truck and headed down to the ramp off the Eau Gallie Causeway. The air temperature on the dash of the truck was reading 59 degrees. The plan was to start on the west side of the Indian River looking for deep holes near rocks, docks, sea walls, or any structure that would heat up early. As I arrived to my first spot around 9am, the water temp was around 65-70 degrees according to my depth finder. I decided to wait for the sun to come up higher and hopefully warm up the water more.

As I was exploring the west side of the river, I noticed there was a lot of long lines of crab traps out today. Feeling like January, I tried out a tip that one of my teacher friends told me. He said that by running the crab buoys north, starting in Sebastian / Grant in the Indian River, he was catching his quota of tripletail within a half-hour. I decided to give it a shot, and sure enough within the first few buoys I see fish dive down out of the way as I cruised by. Not really believing I saw, or what I thought I saw, I circled back around and let the wind take the boat closer to the buoy. My friend said he used cut mullet to catch his tripletail, but all I had today was artificial. I had a small Mirrodine 17mr on a light action pole, and casted at the buoy, and sure enough to my surprise, I drew a strike!

With the wind blowing from the north the last few days, the water was clear enough to see from pretty far away that it was actually a tripletail! Unfortunately, the first one came off the hook at the boat. I decided to quickly ditch the cold water trout game plan and switch to chasing down crab buoys. After finding the first tripletail so quickly, I thought that it was going to be easy, but boy was I wrong, hahaha. I ran all of the crab traps from the Pineda Bridge down to the Melbourne Causeway near Crane Creek, not only north and south, but I also worked both the east and west side of the river. After hundreds of crab traps and a couple hours later, I saw total of three tripletail. The first fish, I found early in the morning was on the west side of the river, near Squid Lips. The second fish, was found and caught off of one of the last buoys before Dragon Point. The third fish, was south of the Eau Gallie causeway and I must of scared it off because it never returned back to the buoy. I took a break in between morning and afternoon crab trap runs and fished the Eau Gallie river for a while, too. I saw a lot of bait being blown up on, and a couple of tarpon roll, but no luck. This is where I may start up my fishing trip this weekend. I hope everyone has a good and safe week out on the water!

Spanky