Fishing Report - Mosquito Lagoon Area 5-18-13

Sat. May 18, 2013
Weather: 68 deg. at launch, 85 at landing
Mostly clear to partly cloudy later in the day
wind: light east winds, 8-10mph +/- at noon
Target Fish: Redfish, Trout
Fish caught: (2) Trout- short, (13-14)  Redfish -upper slot

I fished with my friend Rick Edwards this morning. He has never fished any grass flats, sand holes, etc. and was depending on me to put us on the fish.  We paddled over a mile and a quarter to get to a big grass flat that turned out to be basically dead! The flat was really skinny and the sand holes had a skim of dead grass or some kind of fungus that is growing on the grass, covering the bottom. We paddled all the way to the far end and it was all the same. The worst part was that there was no bait and we did not even jump a red in all our travels there.

We headed to another flat from there and eventually found a decent school of tailing reds. I pulled one 20" fish out of them before they quit tailing.I caught that one on a live bait.

Eventually we moved to the other side of an island and found a big sand hole and the bite was on! We ended up catching three doubles and somewhere around 13-14 upper slot Redfish. We caught them on just about everything we had but I think the gulp shrimp produced the best. Rick caught one on a top water mirrolure. I caught one on a 17MR. We caught a number of them on live bait fish, both finger mullet and one I don't know the ID of. I caught two on live pin fish. Basically, anything that flashed got bit. It was a pretty aggressive bite.

It was a tremendous trip! It started slow and being Rick's first real flats adventure, he was having serious doubts until I finally found the fish.......Now he's all about Mosquito Lagoon!

Check out these photo from the trip.

Larry S.

Waving Rick over to a school of tailing Reds!

That's a tail in the upper left corner.