New Years Day Black Drum

Catching a New Years day black drum wasn't what I had planned for this afternoon's fishing excursion, but that's exactly what was biting this afternoon.

My wife and I decided to take Odie and Elmo fishing with us this afternoon, so we packed up the truck and headed for where we spotted some tailing fish a few days ago.

We drove into Gator Creek road and headed for Catfish Creek loop road to start fishing.

When we eased up to where we wanted to fish, a friend of mine was packing up getting ready to call it a day.

When I asked him if he had any luck,  he told me he missed a redfish on a gold spoon and didn't get any other hits since.  He had been fishing with finger mullet and dead shrimp on the bottom.

After he left the spot, Karen and I tossed out several baits on four rods.

 We decided to fish the area for a half an hour and to move on if we didn't get any bites.

The temperature this afternoon was in the mid 70s with virtually no wind on the water.

Karen was playing with Odie and I started taking pictures of the area.

After a few minutes we started seeing tails in the water.  The calmer the water became, the more tails we saw.

There was a large school of redfish and black drum in the shallow water and they were feeding with gusto.

This particular spot is primarily a mud bottom with some scattered spots of sea grass.  The fish were feeding on crustaceans and I was pretty sure that shrimp would catch us some fish if we stayed there long enough.

After missing one fish that dropped the bait, I heard the click of one of the bait casting reels take off.

I picked up the rod, set the hook and gave the rod to Karen while I went to the truck to pick up my camera to take some shots.

I gave Karen the camera so she could film some of the action and as you can see by the video below, she did a jam up job.


I fought what I thought was a redfish for about five minutes and as it got closer to the bank, I saw it was a stocky black drum around 28" long.

When I finally landed the fish, I took some more pics and released it to fight another day.

My first New Years day black drum was in the record book.

I re-baited with another shrimp and cast out to where the fish were tailing.

After a few minutes I missed another fish that was either a drum or a redfish.  The fish started to run but dropped the bait before I could set the hook.

It was getting late, Odie was getting restless and Karen and I were both hungry, so we decided to call it a day and come back and fish the spot again tomorrow.

I took a few pics of some spoonbills that were in the area and the always awesome sunset before cranking up the truck and heading home.

 

Hope you enjoy them.

Till next time,

Tight Lines!