East Gator Creek Topwater Fishing

East Gator Creek topwater fishing this time of the year is great early in the mornings and close to sunset.

When I got home from work this evening, the first thing I did after unloading the truck was to pack a couple of rods and head for the closest water.

It was almost dusk so I headed for one of my favorite places to fish topwater baits, East Gator Creek.

The water was dead calm in most areas which required some finesse on my part, so I chose to start with a super slow, stop and go retrieve that usually produces hits, and this evening was no different.

The first culvert I stopped to fish turned out to be a bust.  My first cast spooked a large fish that looked like a slot redfish.  Several more casts produced a couple of follows, but no hits so I moved on to try some other likely spots.

A couple was fishing with live baits along the bank, so I slowly rolled past them and stopped when I was a few yards away from where they were fishing.

I made a long cast to the opposite bank with a bass pattern Chug Bug, let it sit until the ripples died, and then gave it a little twitch.    A fish swirled on the bait, so I let it sit and repeated the twitch.

This time a nice sea trout hit the Chug Bug and jumped completely out of the water as it took the bait.

The fish sloshed around in the weeds and got off the hook as I was trying to horse it in to the bank.

I heard the couple on the bank talking about "what was he fishing with" as I continued fan casting the area.

After a couple more casts, a small ladyfish nailed the Chug Bug and jumped all over the place until I could land and release it.

I slowly moved up the road and continued casting to likely spots with the same slow retrieve and managed to catch another ladyfish about the same size.

About this time a juvenile gator came up to follow the Chug Bug, so I moved up the road a bit to get away from the pesky little critter.

To make the story short, I managed to land and release five more ladyfish up to about 20" in length and missed another sea trout that looked like it would hit the 22 or 23" mark before the evening bite stopped.

The skeeters were absolutely brutal without any insect repellent which I didn't think about bringing along, so I decided to head for the house and call it a day before I suffered severe loss of blood.

On the way to the bridge, I took a few pics of the Parrish Park boat launch which was nicely lit up.

On a normal day, I would have continued fishing the topwater plug into the evening for some really big sea trout, but after making an 8 1/2 hour drive from Mobile, Al. I wasn't in the mood for much more fishing.

I'll get some in this next week for sure.

Till next time, Tight Lines.