My Wednesday trip was the second with Thomas Sciascia, over from Grant, Florida. We first fished together in the summer of 2006, and Thom proclaimed it was the best fishing he'd ever experienced. But, a lot has changed and with bait tough, I just hoped I could deliver Thom a good trip. This was Thom's first ride in the Talon. We'd been in the Maverick back in '06.

We began with chasing bait at Chino, but it was very tough. The bright side was that there were plenty of ballyhoo, which I had plans for. We got enough small shiners to fish with, but that was about it. I tried one other spot on further north, but didn't see a shiner.

In retrospect, I should have gone redfishing first! But, knowing how many snook there were in the spot I'd fished on Wednesday, I went for what I though would be a sure thing first. And, the fish were there, all right. They even gave Thom a show or two like we'd seen on Monday. But! They didn't want to eat. The shoreline was also full of mangrove snapper, which were quite willing to eat our small baits. Thom caught eleven snapper, but we managed only three snook.

Once it became apparent that the snook just weren't going to eat, we moved on turning our attention to redfish. But, by the time we got back inside I guess we were too far along in the tide and on the sun. We couldn't buy a redfish bite after fishing a number of good spots. But, while we were fishing the last one we saw a school of jacks rise and begin crashing baits a couple hundred yards away. I knew they'd sound before we could get over to them so we just stayed put and watched attentively.

Although the school didn't rise again, we did see lots of individual hits on top all over the place. It appeared to be ladyfish and trout busting bait. We moved out to them to investigate. After catching a few quick fish with bait, I realized it would probably be better to fish lures. I tied on a couple of TerrorEyez, and we went at it. We caught fish on nearly every cast, and when we didn't we had repeated hits. We were catching ladyfish and trout, and a first, a blacktip shark on a TerrorEyez. Most of the trout were undersized except for a beautiful four pound fish on a live pinfish.

We decided to see if we could get into some keeper trout, and returned to the Chino flat where we'd caught bait, and had nice trout busting all around that morning. We did catch a few more trout on pinfish, including one keeper, but with it near mid-day things were shutting down. It was time for lunch.

We headed to the Waterfront Restaurant, where Thom had the mahi-mahi, and I had the fabulous Cajun seared tuna salad. Oh, my! What a way to end the day! It had been a good day, even though we didn't get a redfish to eat, the snook were tough, and we didn't get the Slam. We had managed to keep something pulling on our lines for most of the day, and that was just fine with Thom. He'd had a great time, and I had thoroughly enjoyed spending another day with him.

A couple more trips next week. It's a week of poor tides. I'd sure like to see us get into our normal summer weather pattern with PM storms, instead of this AM pattern we've been in.

Capt. Butch Rickey
the BarHopp'R
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