A guides life during the winter can be very tough. With cold weather and little business, most of us tend to do other things like hunt, or work a number of odd jobs. I was fortunate to get a few calls for trips over the christmas break and into the first week of January, so I new that locating fish was first on my agenda.
I have two morning trips during the balance of the week so I decided to take Tuesday morning and search for some upper bay trout and reds with my father. Numerous rainfall over the month of December has screwed up Pensacola's bay systems, which makes finding fish very difficult. We started the morning looking for trout which are usually easy to find this time a year. After hitting 6 or 7 spots without a bite we made a 5 mile run to an area that has proved productive when nothing else seems to work. As we approached the area we were greeted with lot's of birds diving on bait, which as any fisherman knows, is a very a good sign during the winter. After a few minutes of casting dad was the first to hook up. He boated a nice 21" red which was released. As my dad was releasing his fish my drag started screaming. A couple minutes later I boated a nice 27" red. After that it was constant action for a about 10 minutes catching several nice trout and a handful of mid to upper slot redfish. We left after 15 minutes becuase I didn't want to drain the watering hole since I have several trips scheduled for the end of the week. We hit several more spots in that area finding more trout and reds. We called it a morning around 10am.
As a guide I feel that pre fishing is very important, unless of course it is the summer and you are chartering everday. Then you will always have the fish located. If nothing else prefishing gives you that confidence factor that you don't have when you are having to fish blind. I love knowing where the fish are before I run a charter!
