Healthy Grin Sport Fishing

Stan Simmerman took me to one of his wintertime speckled trout areas today. We caught a couple of puppy drum and a handful of speckled trout. Three of the specks were over 20 inches long with the largest at 23.5 inches long. All fish were tagged and released.

I went back out after speckled trout this morning. My second cast got slammed. A nice speck inhaled the Mirrolure and was bleeding from the gills. I put it in the livewell to see if it would recover. It did not. Much later, my second bite was a nice perch. That was it, no other bites.

I ran out with Stan Simmerman and Wes Blow this Dec.2 to hit the sea bass before the season closes. Fishing was good. We kept an easy limit of big seas bass. We also caught scup, bluefish, a lot of triggerfish, and tautog. I pulled off a real tog that I really wish I had gotten. Wes tangled with a sandtiger for a bit that he had no interest in catching. Nice rides out and back.

Three blow-ups after the sun went down. One came completely out of the water…big fish. It was still light enough and the water very clear that I could see the fish turn and come back to look at the lure. As I twitched it, it bumped it twice with his nose but did not mouth it.  The next fish just clobbered it. A beautiful, fat, 26-inch speckled trout.

Today, I went speckled trout fishing with Stan Simmerman. It was speck-tacular. There was a period where it was literally a nice trout on every cast. A lot of fish in the 17-19 inch range. I have no idea how many we caught but we had seven over 20 inches. We each had a 23.5-inch fish but I’m sure that mine was larger. I couldn’t keep track of all of the trout but I was able to count the two puppy drum.

Afterwork bite. Three blowups. Held onto one. 22.5 inches.