It took years but I finally got Stan Simmerman to take me to one of his top-secret speckled trout spots. I really thought that he was joking about the blindfold thing. I think we drove over a bridge.
We caught a dozen nice specks and a striped bass. Stan even let me catch a few. We had to tag and release all of the trout. Something about them being Stan’s pets.
A really cool thing is that most of our bites were on topwater lures. Even in the middle of a hot sunny day. I was at my usual 5 bites or so to every fish caught. Stan started telling me to “keep cranking, no slack” stuff. Said it was payback for all of the marlin trips. I have no idea what he is talking about. I never got overly excited or yelled during a billfish bite. Anyway, I was losing enough fish that I really had no comeback.
We did see a school of puppy drum but did not get a good cast on them as both of us were having our topwaters smashed by specks at the time.
