Fishing The Windy Days

Fishing the windy days is never easy, especially around a lot of brush and tight cover.

My usual fishing excursions to the Mosquito Lagoon and Indian River have been cut short because of prior work commitments and the windy weather.  I don't like to continuously battle the wind to catch fish.

After coming home from work Friday evening, I drove around Peacocks Pocket road just to see if anyone was catching fish.

There were a few people driving around the road but mostly tourists enjoying the waterfowl.  I only saw two other fishermen, one in a kayak, and all they were catching was catfish.

 

Late Saturday afternoon I decided to give the bank fishing a try even though the wind was blowing quite a bit.

When I crossed the causeway bridge over the Indian River Lagoon at about 5:00 pm and saw the wind-board surfers skimming across the north side of the river, I knew it would be a tough afternoon fishing.

I had three rods with me tipped with a bass patterned Chug Bug, a Storm wildeye live sardine paddle tail bait and a "Gabbies" crab imitation.  I brought along a cast net but decided against using live bait today, mainly because I didn't care to waste time catching bait.

As it turned out, I probably should have cast for some finger mullet.

I tried several of my "honey holes" in the marsh side of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge with only limited success.  I saw several sea trout and one cruising redfish but had no hits that I could feel.

I edged up to an area I call "snook point" and started fishing the paddle tail bait around some agitated finger mullet and finally hooked up to a small undersized sea trout.

I let let the fish go and tried for about half an hour to get something to hit my lures.

After the first sea trout hit, nothing was interested in that bait so I started casting the Chug Bug into the area.

When fishing the windy days you quickly realize how hard it is to make a lifelike presentation to the fish.  The topwater bait produced only one follow up and no hits, probably because it was skittering all over the surface.

Finally as it started towards dusk, the wind died down enough to make a half decent lure presentation.

I tossed the topwater bait to three cruising reds in the marsh canal but they had lockjaw.

Finally I decided to call it a day and head for some dinner.  The wind and rain had finally taken it's toll.

As I drove out of the refuge, I didn't bother to stop to fish some reds I saw cruising up the canal.  I figured they were pretty well spooked by now from all the people driving down the road.

On the way I spotted these guys out in the river fishing live bait.  It had been raining off and on during the afternoon, so these guys had to be "die hard" fishermen.

I took a few pics of some of the wildlife and a pretty rainbow over the space center and decided to finally call it a day.

As I passed the kayak launch I spotted a wild boar that I almost hit in the road.  As it was running down the trail I managed to get this quick shot off.  This pig was huge and was probably close to 300 pounds.

Hope you guys who are fishing the same area are doing better than I am.

Going to the gun show tomorrow so I probably will not be fishing, especially if it's windy.

Till next time, Tight Lines.