Florida 8th report - winter blues

[BenCantrell]

Happy New Year! We haven't been out in the kayaks since October, and we haven't been out on the ocean in them since August. Conditions were great yesterday, so we were excited to get some miles in.



We tried a new beach in Indian River Shores, and while the swells were only 2 ft, the break was kind of weird. Ally made it through a couple of gnarly waves, but I wasn't as lucky and got flipped back onto the beach. My rods survived, but my safety flag pole broke. I had to chase down a few water bottles bobbing in the surf. I got through on my second attempt. We trolled Rapalas along the inside edge of the reef in about 15 ft of water. Jacks and bluefish were biting.





I told Ally I saw a lot of small marks over the reef, so she stopped to fish with a sabiki and caught an assortment of fish. Here's her with a pigfish.



I continued trolling and added guaguanche and Atlantic sharpnose to my species count for the day. The sharpnose was foul hooked through its dorsal fin, and it actually fought pretty hard.





Ally resumed trolling and added bluefish and Spanish mackerel to her count for the day.



Twice I hooked up with two fish on the same lure. Both times it was a jack and a bluefish.



We have some shark fishing coming next month, so we kept quite a few fish to use as shark bait. Jacks, bluefish, and cuda should all work well. We released as many fish as we caught.



As usual, here's the Garmin screenshot. You can see the inner and outer edges of the reef. If you look on the left side of the screenshot, starting from the beach it goes: 15 ft sand trough, 10 ft reef, and then 20+ ft sand open ocean. I still laugh to myself when I see 22 ft on the screen and think "oh it's deep here!". I do miss deep dropping in CA.



Miles: 10.55
Hours: 5:05
Water temp: 71 F