Day 2-
We generally use the entire day, we were lights at the Delacroix Lodge at 8:45 pm for another 4:30 am wake up.
We woke up to no fog, warmer temps (in the 60's) and dead calm! The boat is always wet and this am was no exception, the skiff was covered in bugs.
After a short drive to Hopedale, we launched the skiff and headed towards the gulf. The seas were dead calm but the cloud cover was pretty thick. It was clear that we could make another Chandeleurs trip and off we went!
The day started trolling the same shoreline but the outside waves were making for a sloppy cruise up the shoreline and the light was poor (clouds and still super early)
We saw huge schools of juvenile black drum, tons of rays and caught a nice bull in the surf (he was cruising the bank in shallow water looking for food and crushed the fly!)
The black drum were being pretty challenging but we did catch a small keeper. It became a bit too dangerous spotting from the poling platform and we made a move to an interior protected island.
I was on the poling platform (with the Pole) and we were targeting small reds. We caught a couple and started seeing some big fins out of the water in a little deeper water 100-200 yards off the shoreline. We eased over and hooked a bull. While fighting this fish, we started seeing more bulls swim by and caught our first double of the day. By the end of the day, we were well over 20 fish, had six "doubles" and stayed in the same area for the entire day. 4 other skiffs eventually joined us and there was a lot of whooping coming from all the boats, it was surreal! By noon, the clouds had moved out and we had great sight fishing conditions.
I've never see so many fish in my life! They would come in waves and while most were black drum, we would spot reds with them and pick them out. Our largest fish of the day taped out at 40" and the rest of the bulls were generally 38/39".
Thanks for following and feel free to ask questions, call, text etc! It was epic and would love to see others have a similar outing! I think our biggest take away is target the days where the wind is projected to be 5 mph or less to make the trip.
LRHF
(720) 425-6138