Announcement: I apologize for the lack of posting lately. I started back to work recently (I'm a middle school teacher) and my time to dedicate to writing has become limited. I will keep posting, I promise, and after things slow down a little bit more for me, posts will become more regular. Please hang in there with me and posts will become more consistent!
So there I was. Standing on the beach of Gulf Shores, Alabama, with a white clouser minnow tied on to a 10 pound leader which was attached to an 8 weight fly rod. I had never done anything remotely close to what I was about to attempt. My goal was to catch one fish over the course of the 4 days that we would be on vacation. I didn't care how big or what species. I just wanted to catch a fish, in the surf, in the Gulf, on my own.
I got to the beach around dawn. While it was pretty much deserted, I noticed some other anglers that were fishing from the beach. While I knew that they could cast further and that I could not beat the live bait that I assumed they were using, I took a little solace in the fact that I might be fishing where fish were located. I assumed that these folks knew what they were doing and if that was the fact, they knew that there were fish in the area. That's all that I was asking for.
As I cautiously stepped into the water, I proceeded with caution for a couple of reasons. Everyone in the group had been stung by jellyfish on the first day. It sounds worse than it was. The stings we got were somewhere between a mosquito bite and a bee sting. It wasn't that bad and more annoying than anything. I also have a healthy respect/fear of the ocean. I understand that everything in the water is trying to eat everything else in the water and I didn't want to be on the menu.
I had been told by some folks to just "cast into the surf" but I still wasn't sure what to do. I'm a details-oriented guy and I felt like I was missing some info. Was I supposed to cast into waves? Was I supposed to cast between waves? Was I supposed to only cast to schools of fish that were actively feeding? How far was I supposed to walk out into the water? Was I supposed to walk past the breakers and fish the deeper water on the backside of the breakers?
After a little trial and error, I settled on fishing the trough on the backside of the breakers and to cast between waves. I arrived at this conclusion because I know fish like transition zones from shallow to deep. I also did not see any fishing swimming through the waves so that told me to not cast into the waves. Casting into the waves also tossed my fly around a lot and I felt that was a less natural presentation. Fish know how to swim and handle current. They don't just flounder around (pun intended) like a dizzy person in a bouncy house.
To my utter shock and amazement, my first bite came about 20 minutes into the morning. I missed it, of course, because I always miss the first of the day. I wasn't disappointed in the least though. I knew it was coming and it gave me hope. I knew that my strategy and fly would work on one fish and if it worked once, it should probably work again. As fortune would have it, the strategy did work again. I had a fish hooked and it was fighting so hard that it was peeling drag pretty quickly. Like the first fish, it came unbuttoned and I didn't land it. It also took one of my two white clouser minnows. While I was disappointed, there wasn't any time to pout. The fish were biting so I rerigged quickly to get back to chasing my goal. One fish.
It took very little time to get back to fishing and my third bite came almost instantly. I gave this fish a proper strip set and it felt like it was solidly hooked. It fought hard but I could tell it was smaller than the previous fish. All I could think was, "Please don't come off!" Eventually it tired and I saw that while it was small, it was indeed a fish that had been legally hooked and not foul hooked. I let the waves bring my prey onto the beach and just like that, I landed my first fish while fly fishing in the surf!
I had no idea what I had caught. It wasn't big but I was impressed by the strength and stamina that it fought with. I later learned that it was a pompano. I suspected that I would be catching a lot of these as the vacation went on. There are a lot more small fish in the ocean than there are big fish. Oddly enough, this was the only pompano that I caught on this trip. That's fishing for you though. You never know what is going to happen and just when you think you have things figured out, nature teaches you a new lesson.
After that, I started to build some confidence in my strategy and some confidence in my skills. Before I move on, let me stress that there are few things as important as confidence on the water. Confidence breeds focus and faith in success. If you have confidence, you're going to do better on the water...in my opinion. The edge that this fish gave me bred a mentality that lead to more success!
On this particular day, I landed two more fish! I cannot stress my utter amazement and joy to this. Both fish were ladyfish (as I found out later) and were caught on the same fly in the same spot. Both fought with the ferocity of lions and were appreciated to a degree that few fish in my life have rivaled. While some locals later told me that ladyfish are the bluegill of the gulf and that they were sorry that I didn't catch anything else, I didn't care. I loved them for what they were. They were a sign of success in a situation that was filled with nothing but hope. The confidence that I gained from these fish fueled me for the rest of the trip and lead to even more catches...but that's a post for another time.
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