Walking Peacocks Pocket Road

Walking Peacocks Pocket Road seemed like a good idea this afternoon when I finally decided to get in some much needed fishing time.

Since there was only about an hour of daylight left before the sunset, I only packed one rod before leaving the house, and that one happened to be tipped with a Johnsons Sprite gold spoon.

The weather this afternoon was chilly but perfect for fishing.  The air temperature was in the 60s and there was almost no wind blowing across the water.

The sunlight was not hampered by any cloud cover and there were a lot of other visitors in the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge taking pictures of the wildlife and trying to catch fish.

I pulled up to the wire rope barrier that crossed the unimproved road to Peacocks Pocket and parked my truck.

I put on my Frog Togs "hoodie" and pocketed a couple of spare lures just in case the gold spoon I was using got broken off or hung on an underwater stickup.

The first culvert at the barrier was open and since there was a strong flow of water, I decided to try a couple of casts.

On my third cast a small redfish nailed the spoon but did not get hooked.  I saw the brief flash of bronze color as the fish hit the lure and the wake as it left the shallow area.

Undaunted, I continued fan casting and after a few more casts hooked up with this sea trout.

 The fish grabbed the gold spoon about three feet away from the culvert and took off like a shot.

After landing the fish and taking a pic it was released to fight another day.

The commotion apparently put down the fish so I started walking up the road and making random casts into the marsh canal.

In the short time available to me, I managed to release two more sea trout about the same size as the first one I landed and missed another larger redfish that for some reason did not get hooked.

Walking Peacocks Pocket Road proved to be great mental therapy.  There was nobody around except for a couple of alligators, some "puddle ducks" and a Kingfisher that kept raising hell with me for some unknown reason.

As the sunset arrived, I took a few pics of the beautiful scenery and started walking back to the truck
. 

As I drove out of the refuge, I decided to stop by the fishing piers to see how well the sport shrimpers were doing.

As I drove into a parking spot the band was playing and there were a lot of people on both fishing piers.  Some were fishing, others were shrimping and many people were just walking around like myself, looking.

I didn't spend much time talking to everybody but the no one seemed to be bragging about a full bucket.   A couple of the guys said the shrimp were big (meaning jumbos) but there weren't many of them. 

After surveying several buckets and walking around for awhile, I wholeheartedly agreed with them.

Till next time, Tight Lines.