About 20 members of my family got together together yesterday for Father's Day. Seven of us and one dog went out on six kayaks to enjoy the day paddling, exploring and fishing, the rest of the crew stayed in the clubhouse and by the pool relaxing and swimming.
My brother and I went next door to the marina to get a few dozen shrimp for bait. As we came up to the bait stand, the Bait Lady pulled up in her truck, delivering some fresh bait shrimp. As she's loading the tanks, my brother Dwayne and I were admiring the pet snook and catfish that always hang out around the dock, waiting to be fed. The bait lady handed us a 5 gallon bucket of about 10 dozen shrimp and said here, you feed them today. Dwayne threw out handfuls of live shrimp and the fish went wild, churning up the water like mad. Hopefully from the pictures below you can see the number of fish, I'd guess at least 80 fish or more, some of them at least 30 inches or more.
Getting ready to throw in some shrimp.
The mad dash.
As the bait lady was walking down the dock, she called out Manatee's. Looking over we saw three Manatee's coming from under some boats along the dock. One was massive, one medium, and one baby, all huge in my book though.
Manatee checking out Bait Lady
Bait Lady checking out Manatee
They swam out to the other side of the dock. Some of the dock hands put out a freshwater hose, and the Manatee turned around, headed for the hose and took a nice cool drink.
Pretty cool way to start the day. We got back to the launch and got all of the kayaks launched and underway. Beautiful day out today.
Some of the group wanted to go exploring, so they left the rest of us to fish. My nephew and I started fishing the channel and hooked some catfish and lady fish. My two brothers went off to fish around some mangroves for some snapper. After about 15 minutes I come around a mangrove and see my two brothers floating side by side. As I approached, my brother Dwayne said, I did it again. He got a hook stuck in his thumb while trying to rescue my brother Neal's line from a mangrove incident. This happened to him a few weeks back with a treble hook getting lodged in his forearm. This one he couldn't cut out, so both of them paddled back in and Dwayne went to the emergency room again to get a hook removed.
Dwayne's hookup.
My nephew Jason fishing the channel. He had injured his arm so he was peddling my Hobie kayak on this trip. I think that's a lady fish he caught.
I headed to the south side of a pair of mangroves that had produced some redfish, snook and snapper before.
My destination, the left, south side of these mangroves.
Some brown pelicans hanging out in the mangroves, there were dozens of these on this one little mangrove.
At my destination.
After anchoring up (strong incoming tide) I made my first cast and caught this nice little snook. He tried getting back under the mangroves, but I was able to keep a tight line and pulled him out.
Fished around a little more and caught a few catfish and pinfish. Around 2:00, high tide, we headed back in to join the rest of our group for lunch. After about an hour and a half, Jason, Dwayne and I headed back down to the launch to do a little wade fishing. It was slack tide at this time so we could fish easily enough and our bait didn't roll with the current. We were all fishing with our leftover shrimp, some alive, mostly dead at this point. We ended up catching some catfish, pinfish and grunts. I think dwayne caught one snapper. Jason caught a nice little Jack and a very nice Flounder.
Jason's Jack
And his really nice Flounder
To top this all off, when I got home around 6:30 pm, my family was waiting for me with dinner on the table and Father's Day gifts. It truly doesn't get any better than this. Thanks for looking.
