One more time in 2005

With the impending cold front, holidays, and work deadlines I had to hit the beach one more time before 2005 expires and the surf rods start collecting dust. My fellow postdoc, Jeff, is in the same predicament so we decided to spend all day Sunday at the cut. We left H-town at 6:30am stopping only for ice and a bag of fresh-dead. Finger mullet were plentiful but large mullet were scarce. There is so much exposed clay that it was tough finding a sandy spot near the cut to fish. I hate fishing over clay because it is impossible to walk on and the spider weights really dig it.

I used shrimp to catch a couple of whiting which became cut bait. We used a combination of shrimp, cut-bait, live and dead finger mullet on the 4 rods. It turned out to be a pretty busy day. We ended up catching 8 bull reds, 1 slot red, 2 small bull sharks, gafftops and baby sharks. The bull reds were caught on casted and kayaked baits. Location didn’t really seem to matter as long as you got over the first bar. Most of the reds were between 39 and 42”. The sharks, while small, were the biggest I have caught this year. I don’t know why I haven’t been able to catch sharks this year.

The water temperature was 75F and it was a nice sunny day. The waves were fairly large and choppy considering the light on-shore winds. The tide was at its lowest when we got there and came in all day. I believe we left right at slack tide which occurred at dusk.