Chokoloskee Bay 12-22-07

I usually work all morning and into the afternoon on weekends but i got lucky and got off at 10am saturday morning so on a whim i loaded the yak on the truck and was choko bound but on the way i ran into a good friend of mine going fishing as well while at the gas station, he was taking a little rinky-dink 9ft "uncle Buck" boat to a little lake for some bass fishing, i told him he needed to come out to choko and feel a redfish pull on the end of his line and after some discussion we decided it was better to try out the little boat than to rent another kayak as we would have to return to the dock at a certain time...i hate restrictions, so with less than 10 knot winds we figured it'd be okay.

I guess i never stopped to think what the incoming tide would do against a 30volt trolling motor on a plastic bathtub with 425-450lbs ontop of it. Well as you can imagine we had a top speed of about .05 knots, it was pitiful, from the marina it took us an hour and a half to reach the oyster bars just off the southern choko coastline. Along the way though we hit a school of jacks which distracted us from the agonizingly slow speed of our craft. We hit the bars with d.o.a. shrimp (rootbeer) and i got a ladyfish, a few trout, but no reds, bobby lost a few trout at the boat and landed one, he was using gulp shrimp. On the crawl back to the marina i casted a silver x-rap and caught the biggest jack of the day right before calling it a day. i will stick to the kayak from now on, no matter what.