The legend of Capt Brian Sanders grows. The Chokoloskee redfish bite is amazingly hot!
On Friday, my friend Bob Hall and I played hookie from the office and went fishing with Capt. Brian. As we started out at 8 AM, Brian mentioned that the tides were outbound, so that catching bait would be tough and fishing would be ‘only average’ until the start of the incoming tide around 1 PM. That said, Brian was able to scare up 40 or so finger sized mullet as bait and our offshore trip to a sunken rock barge produced a huge 38 inch snook as well as half a dozen trout, a small grouper, two stingrays .. and the inadvertent feeding of a few bruising goliath groupers who repeatedly ate the many unknown fish we were hooking. Wandering back to the islands at noon, Brian was able to net a bunch more bait. …. and the redfish fest commenced. First a single catch by me, then a double header by Bob and me.
Finally fishing was so amazingly good that Brian actually told Bob, before casting the rod and handing it to him, that Bob should count to five and then start reeling, as the redfish would be hooked by then. IT HAPPENED EXACTLY AS HE SAID! We had numerous triple headers, where all of us were hooked up. After catching and releasing probably 50 -60 redfish, Bob and I finally surrendered… we were hot and sunburned and tired of catching fish. Bob and I brought home fillets of the three largest redfish we could catch (the limit is one per day per person) as well as six nice sized sea trout.
Interesting to think that Brian began the day by almost apologizing for an expected slow morning… and we wound up a few short hours later asking him to let us stop catching fish so we could get into some air conditioning. He said we probably had another hour of extreme fishing ahead of us if we wanted to stay.
Just thought I’d gloat a little bit and to remind us of how talented a fishing guide we have in Brian.
Dennis Moran
A/K/A The ‘Mac Daddy’ to Emily, Clare and Colleen and the amazing Ms. Angela.
