From: Tiderunner
Category: Fish Report
Date: 11/26/2004
Time: 3:45:56 PM
I’m back in the mountains from the beach, what a wonderful life I have getting to see the best of both worlds. I am thankful this year more than ever.
My beach trip was wonderful spending 5 weeks on an undeveloped barrier island and seeing wonders of the world such as ocean phosphorous exploding in the waves and breaking over porpoise and other fish bodies. On two different occasions I saw whales swimming in the sea one was only 300 yards off the beach and had an escort of a dozen porpoises. I also saw the Aurora borealis on Nov. 6th; we had also seen it in 2001 on Nov. 7th how strange is that. The skies were mostly clear for the lunar eclipse which when you are 3 miles off the mainland with no city lights around was quiet wonderful.
Fishing was overall great with a fast start on Red Drum some up to 50 pounds, then a slow couple weeks topped off by the best speckle trout bite I’ve seen in 10 years. The weather set up was perfect, hard Gale then light NW winds for days. On the best day I had my limit by 9 AM and started to cull them only keeping ones over 3 pounds, the largest was around 7. Overall I brought home 200 quarts of fish filets, shrimp and a couple bushels of oysters.
My only complaint is we never got up with the school of stripers that was around Drum Inlet, when we finally found them it was time to get on the ferry to come home. I hope those there now are hooked up and enjoying this new revived fishery. Always something to look forward to next spring.
My wife has long giving me a hard time about the cost of the fish I bring back placing the value around $50 a pound but this year she’ll have to re-evaluate the price. Fresh is best anyway.
Thanks to the AWFC crew who as always helped in anyway they could. Great seeing all of the old friends and new ones too like "the sea hag" and gaterman.
Still finding sand in my ears but so what? Life is good !
Tiderunner