Simple Saltwater Fishing

As I pulled my shrimp up and let it drop down again...WHOOOOM!! I got hit hard, and I pulled right back. It was a pretty short fight, but I ended up with a small red. We all thought it was a white trout by the color of it then we saw the spot on his tail.

Just a few hours before, we had woken up to a very stormy-looking morning. We went to Denny's to get some breakfast while we waited to see if it would rain. It only sprinkled so we decided to go ahead and get out there. When we got there we saw that a boat was a little..... underwater. We were watching a shrimp boat sink with people trying to save it by pumping the water out. There was nothing we could do so we decided to stay out of the way. We launched a small jon boat and fished a jetty right off the shore with shrimp we bought from a dock nearby.

Once we were out there fishing it was great, cloud cover, gentle breeze everything you would want. There were fish swirling all around us and we caught several of them. My dad started yelling that he got a flounder. He started to pull it in and as it got close I saw a big thin stingray-ish tail swing up. He pulled it up and sure enough it was a stingray, that was not very happy about getting stuck. We cut the line before anyone was stabbed with his barb. I looked over and noticed the shrimp boat was back up straight, and everyone seemed to have calmed down a little. Then as I was watching I heard my uncle Lance start yelling that he got a big fish. I looked over and the rod was seriously bent over, then he pulled the fish in. It was a good eating-size black drum, with really pretty stripes (as you can see in the above picture).

After the excitement the fishing pretty much died. We decided it was time to go home, seeing as how we had been out for hours now. So we left our spot and headed the hundred yards back to the dock. I really liked this trip because you could do it with only a jig head and a few dollars worth of shrimp, and have a blast!! If you want, you can use a plastic cocahoe minnow under a popping cork, redfish and speckled trout will both hit it. It's a great trip that I enjoyed a lot and shows that even if you don't have a big boat or a box filled with special tackle you can still catch fish in saltwater.

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