With the Outcast Inshore slam only 5 day away, I met up with my tournament partner, Captain Lance Powers of Myles Away Charters, in hopes of locating a few big trout. The plan was to trout fish until around 8:00am then fill our bait tank full of croakers for the tournament. The first trout spot we stuck a 6lber within the first five minutes of fishing and caught a 5lber at our next spot pretty quick. We didn’t feel like we needed to trout fish anymore so we hit up our croaker holes and filled up the tank!
The next day I guided Nathon and his buddies on an inshore trip to try and snag a few redfish and flounder. The bite was pretty solid throughout the morning. We caught 15 redfish and 8 flounder. All of the fish were caught on live bull minnows and croakers.
On Wednesday I decided to go solo and look for a few backup redfish and flounder spots for the tournament in case ours fell through. I found lots of 5 to 6lb redfish but nothing I would really like to have on tournament day. Also caught some fine flounder! It was a great day on the water none the less. It is not often that I get to fish by myself for fun. I enjoyed every minute of it!
On thursday, I ran another charter. I try to run a few charters on the week of a tournament so that I can make sure and cover my tournament expenses in case we don’t do well. The flounder and redfish bite was great in the pass all morning. I had a great group of guys and it was a very eventful trip!
Thursday afternoon we had a disaster at our bait tank. For some reason our pump was shut off and all of our tournament bait died! Oh no!! I had planned on taking Friday off, but now I had no choice but to go catch croakers and bull minnows on Friday morning! Unfortunately, half way into croaker fishing my boat died! I soon realized that with such a busy week I had forgot to gas my boat up! haha Thanks to Timmy Land for pulling me to shore!
I couldn’t sleep Friday night so I woke up at 2:30 and prepared all of my tackle for the tournament. haha I can never sleep on tournament mornings! I met Jeff at Hot Spots at 4am to grab a little more bait then off to meet Lance at the boat! Thankfully the weather cleared up just before takeoff!
We hit our first trout spots at 6:15 and caught 3 3lbers. Nothing great but it was a start. At our second trout spot I had a 6lber to the boat and the hook pulled! At 7:30 we decided to give trout a rest for a little while and get a redfish in the boat. The redfish didn’t take long. We boated a 7lber on the first cast and put him on ice. We were done redfishing! Our plan from then on was to put a flounder in the boat then trout fish the rest of the day. It wasn’t easy to catch a flounder but after about two hours we managed one just over 2lbs! At around 12:15 we pulled back up to our trout spot in hopes of upgrading the 12lb slam we had in the boat. On the first cast I boated a 5 1/2lb trout! We were pretty excited by then. We made the decision to spend the rest of the day trying to upgrade our flounder but it never happend! O well! That’s the way it goes! Our 14.6lb was good enough for 2nd place and $7,000 bucks!! That was the perfect end to a great week of fishing!
