I spent New Year’s Day fishing for speckled trout with Wes Blow. Fishing was pretty fantastic, especially for Wes. By the time I caught my third fish, Wes had already caught between 2 and 3 dozen. Things evened out a bit when I moved to the back of the boat with Wes and started fishing his gear. It was even better when Wes took a break and just watched me catch fish for a bit. I lost a really big fish and then managed to catch a 28-inch fish that weighed 7.25 pounds on the digital scale. The one I lost prior to that was much larger. The hook pulled at the boat. Wes got back to fishing seriously after that.
Wes caught so many “24ish” inch fish that he was just slinging them into the boat. We weighed some of his “23.75 inch” fish that were too small for a release citation: 5 to 5.5 pounds. Wes is a tough measurer. We only caught a few fish under 20 inches long and maybe 60 between 20 and 28 inches long with a lot in the 22 to 25 inch range. We fished from dark to dark and the bite was mostly on the whole time, in spurts: wait 15 minutes and then get 3 or 4 bites at one time. Wait another 5 minutes and it would happen again. I do not think we waited for more than 15 minutes in between bites all day and mostly the bites came in multiples. We missed a lot of bites but we caught a whole lot of fish…well, Wes did. I caught plenty.
We released everything today though we had a space in the cooler for that one that got away.
