Well the redfish tournament season came to an end this past Saturday in Orange Beach, AL. The IFA Redfish Tour Championship was held out of the Wharf in Orange Beach last Friday and Saturday. At the captains meeting Hurricane Drew and I were honored with our plaques for winning the Atlantic Division Team of the Year. Stoked to be shooting it out with some of the biggest names in our sport for national team of the year-we were anxious to fish the tournament. We had a bank charger problem on the second day I arrived as my stealth charger quit working and I stayed on the phone with the owener of stealth for nearly 4 hours Monday night until we remedied the problem. What a nice guy and top shelf service to help me after hours-without his help we would have been in a mess. Hurricane Drew went down a week before I arrived and pre fished from LA to Pensacola. He caught several reds in each state but we decided to head east due to the rough seas making the trek 120 miles over the gulf into Louisiana. We ended up making a pretty good run east and had been on 26-27 inch fish all week but knew early in the week that it would be tough to stay on the fish in our A spot due to the tide shifting to the fall by day one. We caught so many oversized redfish during the week that we started just yanking the baits away from the fired up reds. The largest was 45 inches. All fish were caught on soft plastics, bucktails, twitch baits, and spoons. Over the week we caught bluefish, grouper, snapper, false albacore, ladyfish, redfish of all sizes, and more trash fish than you can count. The first day we hit the water together we fished the gulf and saw a few oversize reds cruising and many bluefish. I hooked a bluefish early in the day and flipper came over to say hi. I tossed the bluefish back and flipper ate him instantly and then came right up to the boat close enough to touch begging for more. What a cool sight. Then we headed on east and found a school of perfect slots that were willing to eat on the rising tide. We were amazed at how many perfect tourney fish were in this school and decided to keep up with them all week. Being the tournament was held in Alabama we were not issued culling permits for Florida like we usually have while competing in Florida. Culling is the process of putting a fish in the livewell and upsizing when you catch a larger fish and throwing the smaller one back. A lot of teams did not head east due to not being able to cull. It cost up on day one as Hurricane pulled a 20 inch fish early and we decided to throw him back so we could keep two larger ones. At first we thought we made the right decision because the school floated up right on the surface and I wacked a 26 incher on a white spoon and D hooked up with a 32 incher. If we would have got two legal ones it would have put us right up at the top on day one. We tried to find a partner for the first fish all day in ! several different spots and then bagged it and headed back to a grass flat Drew had prefished near the AL line and we caught an 18 incher on the last cast before we had to head in to weigh in. We weighed two fish for an aggregate weight of 8.92 lbs. We must have caught two dozen reds from 32-42 inches on day one and the bull reds became a nuisance-so much so that we pulled spoons and plastics away from them all day so they couldn't get them. On day two we once again had two shots on our fish and Drew got the 26 incher on that day and I got the 29 inch oversized fish. Then on the way back we once again got a small red kicker fish to give us a complete bag for the day. We weighed in 8.19 lbs on the final day for an aggregate two day total of 16.54 lbs landing us in 23rd place for the tourney and finishing in the money. Not the finish we had hoped for but none the less a decent finish given the circumstances. All things aside it was a great year as we placed in the top ten in every tournament with two wins this past season. Looking forward to next tournament season.
Local reports to follow. I left the reds and trout chewing hard when I left for Orange Beach and as soon as I get my boat back today will have plenty to report locally.
