A slick release.
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It was late afternoon, and the early summer sun was drifting close to cypress treetops on the west shore of the St. Johns River not far from the town of Green Cove Springs. My son Matt, his fishing pal Ryan Reynolds and I had run our skiff south of our home in Jacksonville for a go at largemouth bass.
We had only a couple hours of daylight remaining, but it was prime time, and I figured we’d locate at least a few largemouths before darkness covered us. It was simple, basic fishing. We had commercial shiners and trailed a pair of freeline baits off the stern, while also casting artificials shoreward.
I ran the electric at the bow, while Matt stood at the stern tossing lures and monitoring baits. Ryan was casting amidship. We were throwing weedless spoons far back into eelgrass beds, while keeping the boat in about four feet of water just outside the grass so our trailing shiners wouldn’t foul.
We eased silently along, enjoying the waning afternoon sun and abundant bankside wildlife. Nesting ospreys squawked from high above in cypress trees, blue herons tiptoed through shallows, wood ducks floated near shore and a pair of bald eagles soared overhead, hunting. It was a great afternoon no matter how many fish we caught, but it soon got better when Ryan spotted several feeding fish swirl tight to the bank.
“Something’s chasing minnows,” Ryan bellowed, pointing to a surging hump of water that cut fast left, then right, then culminated in a barrel-size boil. The pursuing fish obviously caught the frenzied bait it was after, right near a pair of cypress knees.
I kicked the electric motor into high gear, turned the boat toward the action, and sent a gold weedless spoon as far as I could toward the surface boil. Ryan fired his 1⁄2-ounce spoon in the same direction, but Matt suddenly was too busy at the stern to follow suit.
“Wow! A fish blasted a shiner, and the second bait’s nervous, too,” he shouted as he set his spinning rod down, and stepped quickly to one of the baitcasting rods attached to a shiner and anchored in a stern rod holder.
Just as Matt reached the rod it bowed heavily under pressure. It bent so far the tip nearly touched water and for a moment I thought the rod would explode or the 15-pound line would part. Matt grabbed the rod, but its long handle was levered against the inside of the gunnel holder and he couldn’t pull it free. Fortunately, line inched off the too-tight drag, preventing a breakoff, and Matt finally got the rod from the holder and settled into the fight.
Ryan and I were watching Matt, not our swimming spoons like we should have been. We both mindlessly continued our retrieves, heads turned, eyes wide on Matt. Ryan was first to feel a strike on his lure, and my hit came a moment later. Both were strong fish, and fortunately they headed away from each other, and Matt’s fish.
The next minute or so was complete pandemonium. I turned the boat sharply, trying to keep lines from crossing and strong fish from fouling in grass or weaving through cypress knees or nearby boat docks. Incredibly, all three fish stayed away from trouble, and the first great hurdle of catching them was cleared. A few minutes later I had my fish close enough to see that it wasn’t a bass, but a redfish, a good one approaching 10 pounds. When the red spotted the boat it dashed away, and my 8-pound-test line suddenly parted, severed by something unseen (I suspect a sunken log). Ryan soon had his fish at the boat, another red of several pounds that we immediately released.
Matt still battled his brute at the stern, and after a seesaw battle Ryan netted a fat 10-pounder, which measured just a half-inch under the legal maximum keeper length of 27 inches.
“Looks like we’ll have redfish on the grill tonight,” Matt said beaming, while high-fiving Ryan.
It took a few minutes to regroup our fishing crew, and while Matt rigged fresh shiner baits and I tied on a new gold spoon, I could see big fish boils and wakes, jumping baitfish and feeding reds far up in the shallows on a bright sandbar tight to flooded cypress knees.
“Forget the shiners!” I barked to Matt. “The reds are way shallow. You guys cast to wakes and jumping bait while I get the boat as far in there as I can.”
The boys moved to the bow, and I tilted the big motor up and shortened the shaft of the electric. A school of feeding redfish was tearing up the inside edge of the eelgrass bed in water so skinny their backs and tails sliced the surface. The fish looked more like bonefish in the Keys than reds in a place more famous for largemouth bass.
For the next 30 minutes we played cat-and-mouse with the reds. They’d blast into bait (mullet, bullhead minnows or shad, I think), and I’d get to them as fast as possible with the boat. We’d fire long casts about the time the reds moved off and crashed bait farther down the bank. We hooked two more redfish before dark, losing one and boating another 6-pounder, and we should have done much better.
That was the first time I’d gotten into a bunch of good-size, feeding red drum in the St. Johns River freshwater shallows where for years I’ve regularly caught largemouth bass. I’ve worked the St. Johns hard for bass for over 25 years, and through that time have periodically caught stripers, crappies and catfish, even tarpon, flounder, seatrout and occasionally red drum from waters where bass are the dominant species. But over the past couple years I’ve caught more and larger redfish here than ever before. It’s become so commonplace that instead of going bass fishing in the river, these days I go redfishing. Today, for me at least, bass are as rare as redfish were in the same freshwater spots five or six years ago.
And lots of anglers are experiencing the same thing, so much so that there’s little question redfish numbers have soared in the river. Such a statement isn’t much of a news flash in the extreme lower St. Johns, where redfish have always been abundant. The traditional saltwater fishery has blossomed since restricted harvest and the net ban went into effect. And, in the freshwater reaches of the river, from the Duval County line south to Palatka and perhaps as far south as Lake George, there are more redfish available today than I can remember.
“I’m catching redfish in many places where before there only were largemouth bass,” explains
well-known Jacksonville guide Jim Romeka. “There are so many redfish, and fishing for them is so predictable, that I can get ’em almost any time I want. And I can do it year-round, which wasn’t possible just a few years ago.”
Crankbaits are deadly around docks and droopoffs.
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Romeka still catches lots of largemouth bass on the St. Johns, and no one believes or has found evidence that redfish are displacing bass. But there’s no denying that plenty of traditional bass hotspots now harbor more redfish than any other species. For example, Romeka has a favorite ledge in the St. Johns within sight of downtown Jacksonville that for years has been a steady producer of largemouths, some pushing the 10-pound mark. That ledge today is stiff with redfish, many of the same size as the bass he has traditionally caught there.
I know a St. Johns shell point that drops from 8 feet to over 20 in a very short distance. It’s not a secret spot, as it’s shown with a channel marker and anglers have fished it for years for catfish, stripers, bream and bass. Today, the place is a sure bet for redfish, with an odd catfish occasionally thrown in, and that’s true summer or winter, spring or autumn. Grub jigs occasionally score well there for reds, and I’ve caught them regularly using jigging spoons tipped with shrimp or artificial scent attractant. When the fish are not aggressive, a whole shrimp or crab bait taken deep on a slip-sinker rig is deadly. By slowly maneuvering a boat along the dropoff, and keeping a bait in position, sooner or later you’ll find the redfish. Sometimes just a few, other times crimson schools.
The river today is loaded with bait, primarily finger mullet, shad, killifish and lots of marine shrimp—and that’s true from Jacksonville to Lake George and beyond (even for marine shrimp, which are thick all the way to Palatka). There also is an abundance of blue crabs in the freshwater reaches of the river, again to Lake George and south. All of these baits are relished by redfish, which surely must factor into the burgeoning river drum population.
In summer, eelgrass beds that line the shallow littoral zone of the St. Johns are alive with all manner of bait, and small blue crabs are especially prolific. Such crabs are easy to catch with a tight-mesh net, and they are extraordinary redfish baits. Slow-trolling them just outside eelgrass beds, as described at the beginning of this story using live shiners, is terrific on redfish, which can’t seem to resist a 3-inch blue crab. This bait also is a plus for redfish as most other river fish species refuse it. Use a short-shank 1/0 or 2/0 hook and barb the crab through the entire shell near a point. Breaking off both pincers helps keep a crab out of grass. Two crabs slow-trolled astern are plenty. In shallow water no weight is needed. In water over five feet a bit of splitshot or sliding sinker rig makes sense to get it down.
Falling tides are best for me when working St. Johns River eelgrass edges for redfish, just as they are in fishing marine creeks and the Intracoastal Waterway along the Northeast Florida coast. This is also historically the best tide phase for fishing shallow water for reds on Gulf of Mexico grassbeds. The reason is simple: Falling water pulls bait out of creeks and flooded marsh, and feeding redfish hold just outside of such places to ambush a meal as it’s sucked to deeper water. Anglers who slow-troll crabs, shiners, shrimp or other baits on the deep side of eelgrass flats, while casting lures into the grass, have the best chance of encountering redfish during falling tides.
During high water, reds surge into grassbeds, creeks and flooded cypress tree cover, chasing bait. Anglers can still catch redfish during high water (wading fishermen can do especially well, but the redfish are more scattered).
Some of the best shallow grassbeds I’ve tested for river redfish are also remarkably similar to spots where I’ve had great redfishing in the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian and Banana rivers. The most consistent places I’ve found for St. Johns reds have broken eelgrass bottoms. Big clumps of eelgrass, with patches of sand on the bankside, as well as between grass “islands,” seem best. This in effect produces sand holes near shore, which are well-known marine gamefish magnets. A few prized river spots have a kind of trough on the shore side of eelgrass patches, which I’m sure harbors bait during falling water and in turn attracts feeding redfish.
While redfish hit a wide variety of lures, 1⁄2-ounce gold spoons work best for me. A new model, offered through a national catalogue, has a painted finish on its convex side and a shiny gold finish on the concave side. I prefer the spoon in golden shiner, firetiger or perch colors—which show well in the eelgrass shallows of the St. Johns. Soft plastic jerkbaits also work well for reds around eelgrass beds, since they can be cast a long way and are completely weedless. At times crankbaits turn on reds, especially near weed-free boat docks, sandbars, rocky spots and bridge abutments.
It pays to use light tackle so that extra-long casts can be made to reds chasing baits far from the boat. For this reason I use 8-pound spinning gear (with a 20-pound shock leader), and 7-foot, fast-action rods. Fly rodders have their innings with river redfish, too, with weedless streamers imitating crabs and shrimp the most productive. I’ve not tried popping bugs yet, but that should attract shallow-grass reds, though they’re not especially adept at taking lures from the top (fun to watch, though).
Bear in mind that this is a new fishery, with much still to be learned. For example, I remember hearing stories years ago about commercial netters slaughtering redfish by the hundreds in deep water off points in the St. Johns River. This was legal, but done hush-hush to protect the fish for netters in the know. It was best in fall, primarily October and November, which also are choice months now for catching big reds in the St. Johns on rod and reel. But I’ve had great river redfishing spring through fall around grassbeds. Only in the very coldest weather and in the very hottest parts of summer do reds hold deep. Once you find them, St. Johns redfish greedily hit jigs, spoons and natural baits—with no fear of nets ruining school for the day.
FS
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