Filed under: Techniques and Strategies
During the cold winter months fly fishers, especially those who sight cast for redfish, have to overcome low sun angle, cold water temperatures, and sluggish fish. All of these came together today.
One blessing is sparkling clear water. If you have waders during the winter months you can chase fish if the water temperatures don’t send them retreating into warmer holes. If you wade without them, you will experience a sharp pain in your ankles and toes. If the water too cold to wade then resort to casting from a drifting boat or poling. Last week my son, Bobby, waded the water in about a foot of water for a couple of hours. When I got back he told me that I was torturing him because he said it was painful to wade. Our idea of cold would probably make members of the Polar Bear club smerk and call us a bunch of wimps. I can accept that and would rather cast from the boat.
This past weekend, stiff north winds made us head directly into the sun all day. To offset the low sun angle, we fished from
10 a.m. to 2 p.m. when the sun is at its highest point. We saw plenty of fish, but sometimes not until we were right on top of them. Fish in these conditions tend to hug the bottom or stay hidden in the grass.
With the number of fish we saw you would have thought that we would have limited out. Two healthy reds were our prize for the day. Three redfish between 20 and 28 inches are legal daily catch limits. That meant we could have kept nine reds, but we probably wouldn’t have.
I used a chartreuse half and half streamer with medium black bead-chained eyes, and a red nose. The streamer or really the hook had an interesting story. On Friday as I was walking to a meeting and a friend came up to me and
gave me a hook he had found on the ground on the university’s “paseo”. He immediately thought of me and when we met he gave it to me. I told him that I would make a fly this weekend and show him the picture. The half & half, a combination of a Lefty’s deceiver and a Clouser deep minnow, it is an easy fly to tie, and its effective.
Winds out of the north were blowing at about 6 mph when we left the dock, but out on the bay they were much higher. My eighteen foot flats boat just seem to travel to fast for effective sight casting. However, it wasn’t until 1 p.m. that I thought of slowing it down. We had missed many fish earlier because of the speed. It wasn’t until we slowed down a bit that Bobby broke “the ice” and my red fell to a good presentation.
When we got to the dock, I gutted the 26 inch redfish and found small crabs in its stomach. The one last week had four eels, several crabs, and a lone shrimp.
Probably what is worse than wind, cold water, and low sun angle is a cloudy sky. It looks like that’s what I’ll have next weekend.
Old Salt
Filed under: Places to Fish, Saltwater Flies, Techniques and Strategies | Tags: flies, fly fishing, redfish, saltwater
Although Redfishonthefly.com is the official website of the Old Salts Fly Fishing Club and we share our reports on our Yahoo Groups page which you can subscribe to on the website, this blog is designed to be more interactive.
Our goal is to learn as much as we can about fly fishing for saltwater species, especially redfish. This species can be found all along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast where favorable conditions like marshes and barrier islands exist.
Redfish or Red Drum are an amazing fly rod target. They usually are aggressive in their behavior toward flies. They also are fairly easy to approach when tailing or cruising and allow fly fishers to make fairly easy casts. They do live on coasts where the wind becomes a problem, so some casting skill is needed. But don’t forget that spotted seatrout, flounder, tarpon, snook, ladyfish, and many other species are found along side reds.
Join us. Learn about fly fishing for reds and other coastal species.
