Gold Spoons Really Rock!

Gold spoons really rock, especially when you fish them before a rainstorm.

After driving 400 miles to make my late afternoon doctor's appointment, I didn't get a chance to wet a line this afternoon until about 5:00 pm.

My wife Karen opted to stay home because of the weather so I loaded three spinning rods into the truck and headed for the nearest potential hotspot. 

As I left the house it started sprinkling and before I got to Peacocks Pocket Road in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, it totally stopped.

The temperature was a pleasant 70 degrees and there was relatively little wind.  Since there was no one around the shallow water kayak launch, I decided to start fishing in the shall bay around the corner from it on the Indian River side of the road.

Nothing beats a gold spoon to locate fish if you know how to fish them right.

With a gold spoon, you can cover a lot of water very quickly and once you find them, you can switch to soft baits or whatever rocks your boat.

After about a dozen casts I finally hooked up to a slot size sea trout which I quickly released.

I continued fan casting the same area and around 6:00 pm, I hooked into this 26" male sea trout.

The fish put up a very bullish fight and at first I thought I had hooked into a redfish. 

I was fishing for meat this afternoon so I decided to keep one fish for dinner and this was it.

I hooked two more smaller trout in the area before it started to rain so I decided to move up the road to another favorite spot that my wife and I named "bobcat bay".

There were two fishermen wading the shallows and one of them was fighting a redfish that he brought to shore and quickly released.  I took a couple of quick picks of the action that didn't really turn out that well, but here they are despite being out of focus.

 

I made a few casts to a cruising redfish on the marsh side of the road but it wasn't eating so I moved up to another area where my wife caught redfish a few weeks ago.

Here I met Sean Mclaughlin with his fishing equipment neatly packed on the back of his bike.

I asked him how he was doing and he said "You're John, you're the reason I'm out here".

He obviously was a reader of this website and I was genuinely surprised anyone would recognize me.

He told me that he was from Orlando and that he hadn't been out to this area in a while. 

Although he wasn't catching any fish, he said the guy in the pickup just up the road from him had missed a nice "bull" redfish on the Indian River side. 

Sean said he was down on the shrimping pier the other evening and caught some nice sea trout but this afternoon he wasn't doing anything.

I gave him some advice along with a couple of the lures that I use in the area and decided to head for home to clean my fish.

I made a couple of halfhearted casts to the area where Jeff, the guy in the pickup truck, said he missed the big redfish but if there was anything in the area, it wasn't interested in my gold spoon.

Sean was packing it in and said he was heading back to Orlando before the lightning got too close. 

I took a few shots of the storm as I was leaving Peacocks Pocket road and was glad I didn't have to make the drive to Orlando that Sean was in for.

One thing is sure, gold spoons really rock if you're after big fish and need to cover large areas of water in a hurry.

In only an hour and a half I managed to land three fish and miss three others.

I just love refuge fishing!

Till next time, Tight Lines.