One trip to report on this week, and man, was it a wet one!

I awoke around 5:30 AM Tuesday morning and stumbled to my computer room still half asleep to check the radar. The weather had been questionable. The radar was lit up with rain and storms just offshore and coming up out of the southwest. As is often the case, most of it seemed to be falling apart as it made landfall. There appeared to be only incidental lightning. I went ahead with morning preparations for my first trip with David Crandall, over from Okeechobee, Florida.

By the time I got to Castaways on Sanibel at quarter to eight, there was a lot of weather streaming in just to our north. It appeared David and I would be OK. We heard some thunder, but it too, was to the north. We got the boats ready, and launched. After paddling half way down the lagoon we ran into a couple of guys where were working on a dock. They informed us they'd just seen the local radar and we were in the clear. All the activity was now moving north.

There wasn't much water in the Sound, as we'd come out at low tide. That means pothole fishing, and I was interested to see if there were any trout staging in the holes, yet. The problem was that it was so overcast and the water was so tannin stained from all the previous rain, visibility was at near zero. Pothole fishing is precision fishing, in that baits must be presented right around the edges of the holes. You need to see. Even having a GPS is not enough. We fished as best we could hoping the cover would at least lift.

It didn't. We floundered around and caught a redfish, and had quite a few hits before he finally hooked up. The water was coming in hard, and I told David I was going a short distance away to see if there were any redfish, yet. He stayed with the holes and managed a keeper trout of about 16 inches.

It started to rain. I called David to come join me to make a big move to another area. As we made our way it began raining harder. The sky was filling in all around us with big dark clouds. I looked over my shoulder to the southwest, and was amazed to see what appeared to be a big wall of water coming straight to us. We were almost at our destination at that point, and as the storm hit us I anchored. David was a short distance behind me.

My lightning detector suddenly began playing it's beeps like rock and roll. We were almost like in a tube. I couldn't hear the thunder, or see the lightning. Hell, David and I couldn't see each other. It came down in buckets! I don't think we could have gotten wetter had we jumped into a swimming pool with our clothes on. Soon, the bilge pumps in our boats were on and blowing all the water out at 1300 gallons/hour.

Finally, the worst of the rain lifted and dialed back to a gentle roar. We began fishing again. Of course, we'd not been fishing long when the wind swung around with the passing of the storm, and we were forced to move to stay on our targeted area. We had lots of bumps and bent weedguards on our spoons, and bump on our jigs, but only managed to boat two snook.

There was a boat sitting on the spot I wanted to fish, and not room for another. We moved on to another spot. Not long before I could get there another boat came roaring in and set up on the west side of the bar. I knew that we could fish the opposite side of the bar in the kayaks without bothering him at all. But, the guide, whoever he was became indignant, because he wanted to now come and fish where we had anchored. I tried to explain to him that he had picked his spot, and that he didn't have title and fishing rights to the whole bar. We weren't bothering him at all, and were separated by the big bar. Finally, he cranked up and left on his outboard without having caught a fish on live bait. We fished all round the bar with our lures and did finally catch a keeper redfish.

The customary bite that usually comes late on the incoming tide on the full moon never really happened. I was puzzled by that, as I've had many stellar days out there fishing in the rain. The front had actually come in on Monday, and I suspect the fish ate well on Monday, and weren't too interested for us. That's fishing. It was still a good time, and great to spend the morning with David.

BarHopp'R Charters
Capt. Butch Rickey
11520 E Palm Drive
Ft. Myers, FL 33908
http://www.barhoppr.com/