Wildlife Photography Outing

Saturday's wildlife photography outing in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge proved to be much more successful than our goal of catching a monster redfish or gator sea trout.

Karen and I left for the refuge around 3:30 pm but didn't start fishing until a little after 4:00.
This afternoon there was a substantial amount of visitor traffic in the refuge.

The roseatte spoonbills are starting to fly in from their migratory routes and everyone with a camera loves taking pictures of them as they are feed with their heads moving side to side in the shallow marsh areas.

This short video below shows you what I mean.

Despite the traffic, I decided to at least try and catch something, so I started blind casting with my favorite beat up Bagley gold spoon.

I bought Karen a new Ugly Stick from Wallmart and mated it up with an Okuma bait runner reel and some 10# Cajun line.

She was using jumbo frozen shrimp with a Cajun Thunder clacker float and a 5/0 Owner hook.

I wasn't sure how the rod would work out but Karen liked the setup and could cast a country mile with the float.

For the sake of brevity, we fished until dusk without any substantial results.

I gave up on my gold spoon and switched to a topwater Zara Spook Jr. which attracted some sea trout that couldn't figure out how to get themselves hooked!

The fish kept hitting the bait out of the water but I couldn't hook up with one.

Karen and I spotted several tailing redfish that were in very shallow water but they were having nothing to do with her shrimp or my plug.

We spotted several wade fishermen in the Indian River side of Peacocks Pocket road, but they didn't seem to be doing much.

The temperature was in the high 70s and the wind was minimal making for a beautiful afternoon in the swamp.

Although we didn't do as well as we normally do, it was great just to get out with Elmo and enjoy the day.

Wildlife photography outings in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge this time of year always provide plenty of opportunities for amateurs and professionals.

Another Beautiful Sunset

I was hoping to get in some fishing this afternoon but the wind was too brisk for my taste.

I would up spending most of the day on the computer deleting the content of some of my websites trying to find the malware that got my 1&1 webspace locked up.

I have hackers!

Till next time, Tight Lines.