Ed Mitchell Outdoors

My friend Dave has been on a roll lately. For one thing the red tide has dialed back on the Gulf side of Florida. Which is great news. Red tide has been a persistent problem for several years from Tampa south to Naples. Between that and the blue-green algae, water quality has sucked. But Dave has been hanging there and fishing as always.

Recently he got himself a brand new motor – a Suzuki 25. Yeah he got a lot of hours out of the old mill, but it was ready to retire. This new one is much more fuel efficient and dependable, allowing him to travel farther in his search for reds. And that new motor just took him to a new redfish. Its a honker.  Great going Dave!

Redfish on the Sandbar

Redfish feed around sandbars, but they are not often on the bar itself. More likely you’ll find reds cruising the outside edge on the ebb, or along the inside edge during the first two hours of the flood. In both cases this puts them in prime feeding territory.

A couple of day ago, my friend Dave, down Florida way, sent me this picture of a nice redfish he caught. He saw it sitting up on a sandbar. So he pitched it a crab fly on his Scott Meridian 8wt. Bingo hookup. I asked Dave why he felt redfish sometimes sit up on the bar. Dave feels the sandbar’s shallow water provide a safe place to hangout, offering shelter from predators such as sharks.  Sounds reasonable.

Small Stripers Hold Our Future

When you catch a small striper, you hold our angling future in your hands. The chart below tells you why. It shows striped bass reproductive success in Maryland, the principal spawning grounds.  As you can see 2019, 2020 and 2021 were very poor years. So right now the only halfway decent year class is the one born back in 2015.

If there is any good news the 2015 year class is bigger than the 1982 year class, the one we saved under amendment 3 and lead to the boom years in the early 1990s. If we can protect the 2015 class there is hope.