Orlando Area Fishing Report from Spotted Tail 4/25/10

Last Sunday Atlanta’s Howard Levy and his 15 year old son Joey joined me for a day’s fly fishing on the Mosquito Lagoon. After a short run I shut the boat off and we prepared to search for fish. As it turned out, very little searching was needed as we hit it squarely.
Joey was up first and in ten minutes he had already had numerous shots. Then a rare thing happened- a fish took his fly, a black redfish worm, and got hooked!
I assumed it was a redfish, but was wrong. It was a black drum, eight pounds or so. Joey had never fished in saltwater and got a solid fish on fly on his first attempt. I love when that happens!
It was overcast so visibility was bad, but there was no wind for about three or four hours so the fishies were tailing all over the place. We got shot after shot after shot, at both reds and black drum. However, we only got two more bites, and missed both of them.
Then a breeze came up out of the northeast.
The fish stopped tailing immediately. We tried finding them anyway and just ran them over. I figured we might do better on a shoreline so we tried that. We ran over a bunch of fish there, too. We just couldn’t see them.
Rain was approaching from the west and only I had raingear, so at about 1 PM we bagged it.

Monday Howard Levy joined me again. Joey was back in Atlanta at school. We went back to the scene of the crime from the previous day and again, fish were tailing all over the place. In spite of the forecast we had quite a bit of sunshine, although I’m not sure that helped a lot.
Howard had dozens of shots. The fish weren’t having any. We fished that spot for four hours or so but didn’t once get bit, even though we changed flies several times along the way. Then a northeast wind came up with sufficient force to cause us to change locations.
We fished several different shorelines and saw fish on every one of them. But a bite was not forthcoming. I thought that he should have gotten three to five fish all things considered. But when we got back to Haulover at 330 PM we had not gotten one bite.

My fisherman for Tuesday cancelled because of the weather forecast. The weather couldn’t have been any nicer, though, not that I went anyway. I did go running.

One morning this week I went out to check my little plot of vegetables. It had been doing great and I was looking forward to having some fresh tomatoes, peppers, green beans, and eggplant in a few weeks. The deer changed all that overnight.
Anyone out there know how to keep deer out of a garden without putting up an eight foot fence? I thought of sprinkling wolf urine all around it. Good plan, but my wolf supply isn’t very good. Any practical suggestions will be welcomed!


Life is great and I love my work!

John Kumiski
www.spottedtail.com