Fly Fishing For Redfish

Fishing for Redfish has been nothing less than spetacular this past week once the wind decided to lay down. With cooling water temps giving us die hard sight fishing enthusist a chance to practice what we preach, we set out in search of schools of Redfish. Armed with 8 and 9 wieght fly rods, floating lines and an assortment of flies we poled the shallows towards the usuall “hang outs” or oyster bars as the common folk call them. looking down towards the water while standing tall on the poling platform I get a glimpse of our first school. 2 o’ clock  70ft. I tell Tommy as we approach the sun soaking school laying motionless on top of an oyster bed. “Look at the big one on the left side of the school, he looks like he will eat” I said in a low tone as to not alert our presence, Tommy peels 60 ft. of line off his fly reel as I position the skiff for the perfect cast, you guessed right, he blows it. I cringed and hoped the school didn’t feel us and as the norm I had to let him know that his knees where knocking. He made up for it on his second attempt as his first cast went unoticed and his second 60ft. cast laid out so nicely that it would have put a smile on Lefty’s face. It wasn’t long before the first Redfish seperated from the school and attacked Tommy’s version of a Merkwan with full aggresion and the fly line came tight, “You got’em” was the first words from my mouth and the next where “hurry up cause I’m next”.

Tommy played and landed this beautiful Red and after a quick snap of the shutter it was released to be caught another day.

Well that took every bit of half hour or so to locate the school, so I was very anxious to give it a go. Tommy and I swapped places and I was ready to battle a bronze beauty. When Tommy hooked his fish the school pushed  about fifty yards and sat on another oyster bar so Tommy approached the next oyster bar at a snail’s pace trying not alert the school that we were coming. “You see that dark spot moving to the left” said Tommy, I quickly glanced in the direction he was speaking of and I saw my first Redfish slowly cruising on the oyster bar, I quickly made a few false cast and put my recently tied olive flats bunny just in reach of the crusing Reds path. It only took on strip before I felt the line go tight and the fight was on.

As you can see from the pictures this scenario went on for while as we boated several reds and missed 2 solid opportunites at double fly hook ups.

The following day we went out again with the same intentions but mother nature decided to make it a little tougher by bring in the clouds and wind for most of the day. I had a small window of calm waters and the sun peeked out long enough for me to make a cast at a tailing Redfish that had all the intentions of devouring my flats bunny.

 

Capt. Chris Herrera

www.palmcoastfishing.com 

 

 

 

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