Kayaker parts low-tide sea of fiddler crabs.

We fished the first morning with Jake Landreneau, son of local fishing guru Joey Landreneau. Jake was paddling his shop project, a 15-foot wooden version of my own kayak. Our first stop was a cove several miles south of Keaton Beach. We fed jigs to school trout in four feet of glass-clear water, and Nichols even traded stares with a ray-escorting cobia directly under his boat before it spooked. After cooking a midafternoon lunch at a shoreline park, we packed up and headed north, where the Big Bend Saltwater Paddling Trail guide and Florida Sportsman Fishing Chart No. 20 clearly indicated the presence of oyster bars.

We didn’t make it to the bars. At the mouth of a cove half a mile offshore in just over a foot of water, I put down my paddle to throw a 3-inch shad-tail on a 1⁄16-ounce jighead into a nervous herd of mullet. On the third bounce, the jig stopped cold, and my kayak was off to the first of five redfish races.

Expecting Mark to be similarly entertained, I was surprised to find him unhooking an impressive trout when I caught up with him.

“When I saw the tails, I assumed they were mullet or redfish, and when I cast to the first one and got a trout, I thought it was just coincidence,” he beamed. “But then it happened a second and a third and a fourth time. I was looking at tailing trout. In all my years of fishing, I’ve never seen tailing trout.”

An exquisite sunset, tailing trout and redfish rides.

Mark and I paddled back through the same cove the next morning, hoping to re-create the magic of the night before. A southeast wind—predicted at 5 to 10 knots the night before, but already brisk in the ominous, cloudy dawn—propelled us toward our target, oyster bars near the mouths of Yates and Little Spring creeks. By the time we got there, 5 to 10 was 15 to 20, and worsening. Despite a sea anchor slowing my drift, I had time for just three casts as I rocketed past the outer bar, releasing a pair of fat 5-pound trout from the tiny oyster mound. I anchored on the main bar farther inshore, where Nichols was already wading and releasing the first of half a dozen small redfish at the far end. The gale-driven current swept his 6-inch weedless soft-plastic bait in a natural manner past the bars, where the rat reds had to grab on quickly before it rushed out of reach. I released a pair of slot trout and a red before my sense of self-preservation persuaded me to inspect the smoother waters inside the mouth of Yates Creek. But even here, the wind made fishing nearly impossible. We held a conference behind the protective spartina breakwater. Knowing that trout and redfish lay just a hundred yards offshore, it was downright painful to call it a day. An hour of exhaustingly hard labor got us back to the trucks. Lesson: Given an option, put in at a location allowing you to paddle upwind to the fishing area. That way you have the wind at your back when you come in.

While the front prematurely terminated a promising start, it could have been exponentially worse. Launching on a low tide that morning, we parked on the same ground as the night before. As we dragged the kayaks toward the distant water, Mark thankfully came up with what proved to be a slice of brilliance.

“Just in case we get a really high tide, maybe we oughta move the trucks up to higher ground.”

So much for the calm marine forecast.

When we returned, we paddled over the biggest mud minnows (killifish) I’ve ever seen, rambunctiously spawning in a foot and a half of water—right where we had initially parked. That’s another lesson to keep in mind when you fish the Big Bend.

Aside from the inexhaustible array of grassflat, oyster bar, spartina and river habitat, the real angling beauty of this region lies in the lack of wariness these fish demonstrate versus their cohorts in Florida’s more heavily fished coastal waters farther south. This being the center of the popping-cork-and-pinfish universe, they seemed delighted to snatch anything that didn’t pop and gurgle, just for a change in diet.

As we headed back to Keaton Beach, we had to laugh at a sign advertising a soon-to-open fitness and tanning facility. My paddled-out arms, abs and chest were too tired to sign up, and no further tanning was needed.

FS