Tag Archives: wade fishing

July Has Been Fun…

This year has been tough for fishing since it has rained almost every weekend. Water levels have fluctuated wildly and caused fishing to be difficult. Now the heat has finally arrived and hopefully will drive the humidity down.

The house projects are almost complete. We had new fencing installed last week and the front deck will be done next week. Yay!!!!! Prices have been eye watering to say the least.

Anyway…enough about that…let’s get on to the fishing.

We have mainly been targeting Bluegill and Redear as those are some of our favorites. Bluegill spawned late this year while Crappie and Bass spawned right on time. With all of the rain, water temps fluctuated quite a bit. It would be warm and sunny all week and by the time Friday evening arrived, the storms would start up and dump a bunch of rain.

We have also been experimenting with different jigheads and soft plastics. We have been testing various Tungsten jigheads as the sensitivity is much better. Coupled with a great rod, good line and a lightweight reel…it makes a difference.

ifish float and BG-1 jighead. Great float system.
Fishing the parking lot of the local lake. lol
searching in flooded timber

Now that things are slowly getting back to normal, I’m hoping to write more articles on the blog. We are both tired of being tied to the house and need to get out and fish more.

We will catch you on the next and thank you for stopping by!

Florida Trip 19MAY2025…

Both of us needed a change of pace. So we booked flights on Allegiant, reserved a rental car and a hotel and packed the necessary gear. Certain times of the year, Allegiant flies round trip from Tulsa to St. Petersburg, and the flights are inexpensive ( $185-ish ).

True to form, this was a Spartan affair, with no frills or major luxuries…at least we weren’t in a tent this time! We packed our travel rods and reels in our Yeti backpacks and combined everything else into one duffel bag.

I used the Salt Strong app, Smart Fishing Spots and the Salt Strong Community for all of my research on what to bring and where to go. We decided that we would target Redfish, Snook and Speckled Trout, but in reality, we’d accept catching anything.

We primarily fished this bay for 2 days

The weather was great and the fishing was better than expected. Doing our research and due diligence really paid off.

We carried everything we would need for the day.

Since we weren’t catching much on the Gulf side, we opted to fish the bay off behind the main beach. Both of us love to wade fish, so this was what we came to do.

My First Snook
It’s mandatory to tie on a new leader after every Snook.
If you struggle to tie the FG knot…buy a DaiichiSeiko Knot Assist 2.0. Thank me later!
A well earned smile!

We had a great trip and all of our chosen gear worked perfectly. We mainly used Shimano Zodias 5-pc rods in Medium Light and Medium with Shimano Twin Power C3000 or Shimano Exsence C3000 reels. We were spooled up with 10 pound braid and 20 lb monofilament leaders. We threw 7gr-10gr jigheads with various plastic baits to great effect. We did bring TFO Traveler 3-pc rods as backups, but they seemed ridiculously heavy and unwieldy compared to the Zodias rods. They ended up being more of a nuisance than anything. But they gave us peace of mind in the event we broke a rod. I think that if we do another trip like this, we will each pack two Zodias travel rods, since they fit inside the Yeti Pangas.

Would we move to Florida just for the multitude of fishing opportunities? Hell no! Way too much traffic and way too many people. But the funny thing for us was that there were probably 20,000 people on the ocean side of the beach and we fished the back bay for two days and only saw one other person back there.

We will deem this a successful trip and we learned a lot. I definitely see us doing another trip like this.