I fished with shop client Roger Drouin yesterday afternoon out of Goodland. We fished the bottom of the tide with hopes of sight fishing snook and redfish on the fly. The tide was extremely low and even in Roger's 16' kevlar Dolphin which draws only 4 1/2" of water there were a lot of places that we could not go. The places that we could get into all held fish, but by nature of the high afternoon sun, low water, and Ospreys, the fish were very spooky. If The fish saw your line in the air, they were gone! I missed a nice snook on the strike in our first spot, that was angler error. The fish tried to eat the black and purple E.P.
We looked at a couple of other spots but all were too low, and so it was off to the outside. We worked an outside shoreline right as the tide was switching from dead low to incoming. There were snook and reds working the shoreline in gin clear water. Anyone who fishes the beach for snook can appreciate how tuff they can be, and these fish were no different.
A couple of fly changes started to produce results for us. The two flies that worked for us on the outside were the E.P. peanut butter with a white belly and yellow back, and a smallish pink Kwan with bead chain eyes. We only caught fish that we saw and made perfect casts to. Even fish that we made perfect casts to were not always interested. I believe that if we had fished a small or medium sized clouser minnow with a white belly and Chartreuse back we would have done better, but did we have the fly with us? No Anyways, the fish are out there, but getting them to eat is never a sure thing. We did have a nice red eat the fly, and again we angler errored. I hope that every one is getting a chance to fish these days now that the crowds are gone.

Fish On
Henley