Inane Randomness

Tomorrow night, there is a showing of the movie Jaws at The Capitol Theater in downtown Clearwater. I DID see it in the theater in 1978 when it was re-released, but this will be cool. My brother has never seen it in the theater.

It's weird, because I'm currently reading a book about the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks in which the book Jaws by Peter Benchely was loosely based. I've always been intrigued by sharks and shark behavior. It's amazing to me that there is still a bit of debate and speculation about whether or not the shark was a Bull Shark or Great White. I'm currently on the Bull Shark side as I've never heard of a case where a Great White has swam up a river or creek. This of course is normal behavior for Bull Sharks....I LOVE history.

The rain has really dirtied up the water clarity around here and all of my scouting trips have been cancelled due to bad weather. Might do one big scouting trip on Friday...but I'm not sure yet.

Behind The Fly Rod

I had the honor of doing an Angler Spotlight piece for Yakangler.com this week. Don't mind the first photo though as I look like I'm sinking my kayak. After mentioning this to the photographer, my brother, he commented that he thought he was shooting it for "cakeangler.com"...guess admitting that you have a problem is the hardest part....

Oh, and the article can be read here

The rain for the last three days has pretty much ruined my scouting missions for the week. Three days of constant rain? Really? The last time I can remember that happening was in 2004 when the weekly hurricanes would roll through. So lack of scouting missions and I'm guessing, super murky water and short tides might make it one big scouting mission this weekend....was going to target snook on the dock lights, but not sure now.

Advancements In Dolphin Eco-Tourism - St Joseph Sound

I've been thinking recently that maybe instead of fishing, I should turn the blog into a dolphin sight seeing tourism cash grab. 8 out of the last 10 fishing trips, I've seen dolphin up close - so close in fact that I could see the famous toothy grin. I've seen dolphin more than caught fish recently.

Yesterday morning was no different.

I left the house at 5:30 AM to meet Keith at St Joseph Sound and to launch at first light in the hopes of finding early morning redfish on the feed on the lush grass flats. The water was glassy calm as I drove along Edgewater Drive, but as soon as I arrived at the launch site, the wind picked up and I could see flashes of lightning in the distance and hear thunder booms a few miles away to the north and south. The gray dawn revealed rain clouds everywhere.

This large expanse of grass flats between Anclote Key and the Tarpon Springs shoreline are some of the best I've ever seen and have a unique feature; 10 feet deep holes amid 3-4 feet depths with decent moving water. The plan was to cast to the edges of the holes on the up current side and let the fly drift and bounce down the slope...this didn't produce any fish so we drifted across the flat.

The wind pushed us fairly hard. Cold down drafts from the thunderstorm cell to the southeast. The thing I kept thinking about was "We're going to have to paddle back into this wind to get back to the car" but, by some small miracle, the wind slowed...and we were able to paddle back the way we came with ease.

That's when the dolphin showed up. You could see and hear the furious splashing along the shallow mangrove shoreline as the dolphin herded the fish against the bank. Again, only a single dolphin. As we drew closer, I could see that it was around 6 feet in length, and was "fluking"...where it swims on its side and the fluke sticks out of the water. It wasn't shy or afraid of us and I paddled right up to it to snap a few photos.

On the paddle back to the car, the rain started....a free rinse job for the drive home.