Fishing Canaveral 10/29
Since I’m working the next couple of weekends, I took today off and headed to Canaveral. Pretty cold this morning—mid-40s when I was setting up at the beach. Living in Florida the past eight years, I’d forgotten how much clumsier you are in wind and cold. the fifth beach was closed for a rocket launch—I would have caught a LOT more if I’d been able to fish the deep trough down there.
My first cast landed an undersized black drum on one of my tricked-out pompano rigs and shrimp pieces, the first I’ve caught in the surf. Caught a nice 15” whiting a little later on the same setup.
About an hour into the day, my main surfcasting reel had yet another malfunction—I’m taking it back to BassPro and getting something else. The reel design (Oceanmaster—BassPro house brand) is flawed—it requires consistent tension on the line, otherwise it skips the skirt on the spool and gets wound around the pin. (The area under the skirt that houses the pin is open, not sealed as in most reels. I guess they designed it that way to make cleaning easier.) But in surfcasting, your line is always going lax. So, of course, lots of errors. Long story short, in trying to fix the problem I made the reel inoperable. So, I spent the rest of the day fishing with just my six-foot bass pole and hybrid, seven-pound line.
When I ran out of shrimp, I started using cut mullet. The blues were tearing it up—I lost count of how many I caught, but ended up with eight nice ones. I love blues—they remind me of sardines or herring. Tonight I got busy in the kitchen and made fish pie (a Jamie Oliver recipe: mashed potatoes, cheese, spinach and fish—tacky but tasty!) and a fabulous Venetian dish, sfogi in saor.
