I took a short nap after dinner then headed out for some nighttime speckled trout fishing. Fished on into the morning. I caught small speckled trout. I managed to lose my two big trout at the boat. One went nuts, jumping out of the water twice. Barely hooked and it pulled next to the boat. Not good but I’d been lucky to get that one. The other, behaved itself and stayed down, fought hard. I thought I had another puppy drum. I may have gotten a little too excited when I saw that it was a big trout instead. Much larger than the other I lost. I managed to snag the lure with the net with the trout on the wrong side of the net. Effective dehooking technique. It took the trout a moment to understand that I’d freed it and I tried to scoop it up but watched it slide over the rim of the net.
I’m too old to play like a rookie but there I was rookying the rookiest any rookie has ever rookied.
In-between calling myself an idiot, I continue to catch fish. Small trout and I caught a couple of rockfish. One was too large to keep, the other just right. That is a really small slot we have now. The puppy drum were in the 24 to 26 inch range and were plenty to handle on the speck gear. I kept a limit of redfish and tagged the rest. A good night of fishing…if I had just caught that fish…idiot.
Oh, I took a photo of a black-crowned night-heron to show that Tricia Neill doesn’t take all of the bird photos. OK, yes, she does but I did get this one.
