Peacocks Pocket Road Has Opened!

After a couple of months, Peacocks Pocket Road has finally opened for traffic.

It was closed by the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge powers that be, to refurbish some of the culverts and bad areas of the unimproved drive.

The road meanders about 9 miles from its easternmost entrance from the Max Brewer Memorial Parkway, around the banks of the northern Indian River Lagoon and exits back farther west back on the Parkway.

There is always good fishing in the shallows on the river side as well as the marsh areas; depending on which culverts are opened and in which direction the water is flowing.

Today, my wife and I took Elmo our wonder dog fishing along the southern end of Peacocks Pocket Road.

As we entered, I started casting with a Skitter walk and immediately had a 24" plus trout knock the plug about two feet completely out of the water. The fish was never actually hooked, just very pissed off at the lure.

I made several casts until my arm got tired and we moved on farther up the road to try our luck in the Indian River side grass flats.

Since it had just stopped raining and the air was nice and fresh, I continued with my top water and caught probably the smallest redfish of my entire life. The fish was only slightly larger than my lure. See the pics.



My wife missed a couple of strikes on her shrimp as I changed lures and continued casting with a white DOA CAL bait on a 1/4 oz. chartreuse jig head.

After about 5 casts, I hooked onto a hefty black drum that put up a respectable fight on my 10# cajun thunder line. The fish was full bodied and measured in at 29". I didn't have a scale so I can't be sure, but the fish probably weighed in close to 20 pounds.



Too bad my wife doesn't know how to take a movie with my Nikon Cool Pix; it would have been nice to post.

Anyway, we took some pictures and returned the fish to grow even bigger for somebody else to enjoy catching.

We moved to "bobcat bay" where we decided to fish until we had to leave the refuge.

On the way we encountered a "herd" of baby turtles that I just had to take a clip of.

When we got to bobcat bay, there were some snook murdering baitfish in very shallow water on the other side of the "bay", but I couldn't cast my plug that far.

I managed to miss a couple of nice sea trout and caught one that was again just about the size of my lure.

As the green headed horseflies sucked the last of my blood from my legs; Karen and I decided it was time to go.

Elmo was savvy enough to stay in the truck to avoid the bugs. Karen and I weren't so lucky.

I swear, I've never seen hordes of horseflies actually follow a vehicle to get at the passengers until today, but they did just that.

Next time I won't forget the spray.

Tight Lines!