Our Thanksgiving trip to Florida included a day of fishing with Dr. butcher. It happened to be Zoë’s first time fishing.
These are the waters that I grew up on. I spent many a day out fishing. There are two basic types of fishing that you do in the Ft. Myers area; offshore and mangroves. This day was a day offshore.
It started out with us looking for bait after running about 45 minutes around Sanibel. The weather had been up for a couple of days, but it laid down nicely. Dr. Butcher made one cast with the cast-net and we were loaded up with bait. We tried the shore for a few minutes where he has had some luck with Snook, but there wasn’t anything going. Then we headed a couple of miles to a barge wreck.
There was a lot of mud being kicked up in the water and the current was running nicely. We dropped down some baits working both the surface and the bottom. It didn’t take too long to get bit. Zoë and I both got redfish at about the same time. This was her first fish ever. A redfish over the slot limit. Not a bad start.
We had some more luck there. Nothing too impressive, but Zoë got two more species with a mackerel and a ladyfish.
Then we moved to another area a little deeper and the action got more interesting. We ran into Kingfish. Zoe also learned a little about bottom fishing and pulled in some grouper. She got two types of grouper, a red and some gags. Then she got the prime fish we were looking for, a snook. Snook is one of the best eating fish there is. Many people spend a lot of time trying to ever catch one. She ended up with two on her first day of fishing. It made for a great meal. The Kingfish were a lot of fun, and a lot of work on light tackle.
All in all, she caught 8 different species and we had a great day. We were worried about what the girls were doing to our parents. It turns out that they were very good so everyone had a great day.