We're on Eastern Lake at Seagrove Beach FL for the week, a ten-acre tidal blackwater an hour + east of the pass at Pensacola.
The lake's very narrow outflow to the Gulf is 90% sanded-out currently with big rains all weekend- so the lake is correspondingly 90% fresh.
Our hosts are dear friends JoDel and Dexter Hambaugh. Dex found his landscaping tools in his ride and cropped back the overgrown cane around the dock
We were thinking flounder, but everything else is showing up.
Fat bream are plentiful and hungry. Dexter caught the first few- this was one of the smallest
I'm fishing a Fenglass SF74 and Garcia 301 with light line
Croaker dropped by
A twenty-inch eel says Howdy ... and I say Good Riddance
Our mascot Gramma Trout, put together by Dexter. Yes, cocktails were involved
Our hosts drove to a Van Morrison concert overnight so we babysat their sweet junkyard dog Max (as Dexter calls him). Here Max takes Anne for a walk.
Good dog Max!
Today we fished the lake's outflow.
Our first sight was a family capitalizing on +20" speckled trout trapped in a tiny pool just beside the small pass. The water was barely 18" deep and the family was using crab nets and sticks to chase the magnificent fish onto the sand where they lay dying
If you freeze frame at the end of this short video you'll see the so-called "adults" driving the fish with their nets up the pool where the kids were whacking at them with their rods
Their broken crab nets after the slugfest
I told the Granddad, husband and wife that it was totally unsportsmanlike, as did Dexter. And probably illegal. They said they were going to eat the catch but that was hardly the point.
Later we saw them throwing some of the fish into the outlet. How depressing.
Onwards and upwards!
I picked up a juvie largemouth who kicked ass- lots of fun. Everything released
More later, thanks