Sea Trout In The Ditches

The sea trout in the ditches were a little harder to catch this evening but I still managed to catch and release five fish before it got too dark to fish.

I didn't bother to get out this evening until about 6:30 pm which gave me about an hour and a half fishing time.

As usual, I headed for the closest water which is in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.

I took three rods with me that were rigged with a topwater bait, a soft bait, and a suspending bait I caught all of the trout on an XPS Slim Dog bait that I picked up at Bass Pro some time ago in Savannah, Ga.

The air temperature was 90 degrees when I hit the refuge and there was no wind blowing on the water.

I concentrated on fishing the "ditches" along the side of Peacocks Pocket Road, mainly because of all the weeds in the river that had blown in and lined the shoreline.

At the first couple of stops, I had only one followup that didn't seem at all interested in eating the XPS bait.

When I got close to an area my wife calls "her tree",  a breeze started blowing and I could see a storm was beginning to whip up South of Titusville.

I'm not sure if it was the breeze on the water or the barometric change in the weather that turned on the fish but they started nailing the topwater bait like they hadn't had a meal in months.

In the next hour I hooked and landed five trout and missed three more fish on the XPS bait that I'm pretty sure were also sea trout. 

All the fish caught were just at, or over the slot limit and were released to fight another day.

As it started getting towards dusk, it was almost if someone pulled a lever because the fish simply stopped biting.

I made several more casts in three more areas, but never got another fish or even a followup, so I packed up the rods and headed home.

It never did rain, but the wind had picked up considerably and I could see lightning on the horizon.

Till next time, Tight Lines.