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| Sydney and a little frog. |
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| Adam and some buddies. |
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| Kim, Sydney, and I. |
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| A rope swing along the way. Sydney's first try at it... |
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| WooHoo. |
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| One of three or four brown trout we caught. The mad has both brown and rainbow. We never caught a rainbow. All the browns were about this size but we saw some that were quite a bit bigger. |
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| White Sucker. Saw pretty large schools of these things. The great thing about the mad river is the water clarity. Really clear spring water. And really cold. |
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| It was probably a two or three feet deep here with grass growing off the bottom. |
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| Adam with another white sucker. No idea why these things were biting on rooster tails. |
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| Our only portage. River mile 39.1. |
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| Adam standing on one of only about three gravel bars we passed. The section of river we canoed had very consistent depth (between 2 and 5 feet) and consistent current. Only steering. Almost no paddling. |
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| Bye Bye. |
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| Maybe our best smallmouth on the LM so far. |
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| A little map turtle. |
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| The underside was more colorful. |
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| Gizzard Shad. |
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| Pretty nice freshwater drum. |
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| Little Walleye. First one we've caught on the Little Miami. |
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| Casted into tree. Jerked really hard to get lure out of tree. Lure shot back at me hard enough to embed itself in my leg (past the barbs). I took off the other treb so I didn't wind up with the other set of hooks in my leg and canoed the few miles to our pick-up point with a crank bait hanging out of my leg! It was somehow still an enjoyable day. Headed to CVS after fishing to pick up razor blades and cut the lure out. Hey, I've been fishing over 30 years. It had to happen sooner or later. Biggest catch of the day was me! :o( |
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| A 30lb redfish. This was the highlight of our trip by far. The day before it had rained a TON and there was a huge amount of water draining out of the intracoastal along a low pier next to our hotel. We got up early and caught some mullet in the casting net over at the boat ramp. I always try to use the casting net at a boat ramp because it guarantees you won't lose the net by getting it snagged on the bottom. We used a baiting needle to thread a long shank hook down the length of a 3" mullet. We put the hook with mullet on a 6" leader and used a two ounce egg weight above the leader. I don't like using so much weight but the current was so strong that we had to. I always put an orange bead between the egg weight and the knot to protect the knot. Adam casted his mullet out just on the edge of where the current was coming out of the intracoastal. Eventually, I heard him shout "I gotta bite and it's big". He says this a lot, but this time I heard his drag sing. I wasn't sure how I had the drag set (dumb), so I grabbed the pole long enough to make sure it couldn't pull him off the pier and into the current. Then I handed it back. It went on two big runs, and he fought it for about 15 minutes until the redfish was exhausted. Once he had it up alongside the pier, I took the pole just to walk it down the length of the pier to land it on the beach (no net). I didn't want to take the chance of him walking it down the pier and brushing the line up against the barnacles on the pilings (a mistake I made when I was 9!). |
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| This shows the pier where we caught the redfish. On the side to the right of Sydney, water was rushing through a channel and out of the intracoastal on the morning we caught the redfish. That's a little croaker that Syd is throwing to the heron. |
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| Gulf Flounder. We had come to this same pier on Dauphin Island the day before and met two older guys catching gulf flounder. They were using the exact same bait as us but we weren't catching any flounder. Eventually, I became curious enough to ask how they were doing it. They were using half ounce weights above a 12" 20lb mono leader (turns out flounder have teeth). They were lip hooking mullet fingerlings and dropping them straight down along each piling on the pier. If they didn't get a bite after a couple minutes they'd move to the next piling. This is the interesting part... when they did get a bite they'd wait 20 seconds before setting the hook. According to the older of the two old guys, flounder need time to get the mullet turned around in their mouths or you'll jerk the bait away without getting them hooked. Obviously he was right because we didn't catch any flounder until we followed his advice the next day. Interesting tidbit... Apparently gulf flounder can change color to match the sea floor. |
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| An atlantic spadefish we caught on fresh shrimp the day before catching the flounder. I don't think we caught anything all week on frozen bait. We did much better using the shrimp and mullet we caught in the casting net at the boat ramps. |
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| Mangrove snapper caught on a lip hooked mullet fingerling while fishing for flounder (1/2 ounce egg weight and 20lb mono leader). |
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| Speckled Sea Trout caught on a silver spoon surf fishing from the beach in front of the beach house. |
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| Lane Snapper. |
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| Hardhead catfish caught fishing frozen squid from the beach. |
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| We had to look this one up when we got home. It's called a sea robin. Caught on a jig with a bit of shrimp attached. |
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| Atlantic Croaker. |
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| Black Drum. |
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| Jack Crevalle. This was caught in Fort Myers Beach the year before on fresh mullet. |
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| Adam's first shark! Caught in 2010 in Litchfield, SC. |
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| Our net was entirely too small. We netted it's toothy snout and grabbed the other end of it by the tail. Chaos. |
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| Big blow-down. |
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| Taking a break to catch toads. |
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Checking out the goose babies hiding in the weeds.
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