Skeet’s Beat – Filming in Florida With Captain Blair Wiggins

The day after I did my appearance at Bass Pro Shops, I played around on Lake Toho for a day while I was waiting to head to Titusville, Fla. to film with my Wright & McGill Co. teammate Captain Blair Wiggins. Our plan for the day was to go after some really big redfish. We were hoping to go out there and catch enough big fish to film one of Blair’s television shows.

We went out on the coast in an area called Mosquito Lagoon; which is right near the Kennedy Space Center, where they launch the Space Shuttle from. I can’t only begin to imagine how cool it would be to watch a launch from that close, but we were there on a different day.

We met up and went out in a little 16 foot Ranger flats boat with a 60 horsepower engine on it. We were running in less than two feet of water as we were going back into the bay to fish. Once we got in there, we started to come off plane and the motor was bouncing on the bottom until we stopped.
Once we did come to a stop, we had to push pole our way through the shallow water looking for schools of big redfish. We found a bunch too, most of them in the 30 to 40 pound range, in big schools.

We were sightfishing for them, and it turned out to be a really tough day for us. Blair caught one big one that weighed 35 pounds, but I wasn’t able to catch any of the redfish.

I did catch a giant black drum though. It was cool because I had a final prototype of my new Micro Honeycomb dropshot rod with me. I put one of my size 3000 Victory spinning reels that I had spooled with 15-pound-test Spiderwire FluroBraid, a new sinking braided line made by Spiderwire; I put a 15-pound-leader of Trilene 100% Fluorocarbon on it. I put a live shrimp on a 3/0 TroKar TK190 Tournament Tube hook and made casts to the school of drum.

It took about ten casts, but I finally got one to bite, and when it did, I set the hook and the battle was on. It took about 15 to 20 minutes to land the fish and that finesse rod handled everything that 50-pound drum tried to give me, and I’m totally impressed.

Those were the only two fish we caught that day, so we decided to try again the next day. That day turned out to be a bust too because once we got on the water the wind started blowing and the clouds came in. When the skies opened up and started raining, we all got soaked, because we didn’t plan on it and didn’t bring any rain gear.

Well, practice starts for our first Elite Series event at the Harris Chain today. It’s going to be a tournament that we’ll have to decide whether to sight fish or fish for them normally. It could be both, we’ll just have to wait and see what practice shows.

Harris Chain is the site of my first Tour Level win, and I’m hoping to find a way to duplicate that result.

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