The Dog days were upon us – hot, steamy with plenty of thunderstorms. However, the fishing can be quite good in August…particularly if you’re open minded.

The backwater drum fishing was excellent this year, and we had a great time with the Sharks (both big boys and bonnetheads), spanish mackerel and amberjacks. When we could get out – we had great mixed-bag offshore days.

I had some of my favorite people a couple of days this week – Dave, his wife Beth and this time, their son Andrew.

Dave and Andrew had a great morning trip. We put Andrew on a bunch of blues and spanish – and we even managed to get him a 5lb’r and a 3lb’r on light spinning tackle! We then fed a few blues to some sharks – catching a nice blacknose. After we did that for a bit, we decided to switch gears and go after some of the bonnie sharks. We found them eating big time and we had a BLAST (all thanks to my friend Danny Adams for putting us on ’em!) jigging these guys up catching several in the 12-17lb class. You don’t see bonnetheads this big many places…what a great way to spend an hour or two on a hot summer day.

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Beth and Dave also had a fun day with the drum – while we didnt catch many, we saw a lot in several big schools and had a bunch of hookups. Even managed to land a couple of those 🙂 They also were probably the last clinets of mine to fish aboard my Jones Brothers Bateau. I have had some very good times with these two (and other family members) on that rig – so i think it was a nice farewell.

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Dan, his dad and his nephew had a fun “dog days of summer” excursion that kept us all entertained. We started off with the spaniards and blues…and then fed a few of them to some blacknose sharks. After that, while we watched a giant thunderstorm brew to the north of us, we jigged for bonnethead sharks – and we smoked the big bonnies this morning catching a bunch.

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Jeff and I started off our morning with light winds and a favorable forcast. Two hours later it was blowing 20+ and the tide was dropping out to an incredibly low level. We sheltered ourselves and found some very nice drum around the docks – but they were big and we had trouble keeping a few out of the structure. Jeff did get a 34 incher that was an incredible fight!

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George and Stu had an excellent day in the backwaters – we found a bunch of drum (And a couple of bonus 3lb trout) in the creeks. We then hit the dock finding some small flounder, plenty of slot drum and several nice sheepshead!

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I took out Jeff and his two nephews nearshore/offshore on a very calm day to look for some action. While we “lost one” very quickly to seasickness, we found an absolute feeding frenzy around a big baitball full of sardines. What was feeding on them? Cudas and Albacore. Nothing better to keep a 12 year old entertained than a bunch of jumping, mean, toothy cudas. I think we landed 12 cudas, 8 albies and several sharks. We had some very nice mackerel hooked up…but the cudas got to them first. I am sure we could have found better fish elsewhere, but when you’re fishing and not going more than 5 minutes without a bite at any given time. Can’t go wrong with that.
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