Florida's Hidden Gems: Catch a Variety in West Jax Creeks

• Hidden Gems: Roads less traveled & waters less fished in Florida. Florida Sportsman magazine’s 'Hidden Gems’ project in the August-September 2024 issue featured 14 hotspots for Florida's hunters and anglers, from the Keys to the Panhandle. This installment highlights unusual fishing in west Jacksonville creeks.

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Chumming in West Jax

Creeks once written off as not worth the effort are now producing a variety of "ditch pickles."

More Hidden Gems

• Deep-Drop Fishing in the Keys
• St. Mary's Fish-Rich Jetties
• Waterfowl or Bass at Broadmoor Marsh
• Dock Fishing After the Storm
• The Mysterious Dumfoundling Bay
• Local Flavor at 'Hookin Ain't Easy'
• Tower ‘Hunting' for Pheasants
• Mutton Magic at the Elbow
• Spillway Fishing Is Fast-Food Service For Snook
• How to Catch Mangrove Snapper off the Panhandle

Old friend Matt Field couldn’t help but laugh. ”If that wasn’t fast enough for you, I can open her up, but let me warn you, it will suck the coffee out of your cup.” The truth is, Matt had run his bass boat at a speed that made sure I’d never find my way back to his hidden ledge. I do know it was in an unnamed creek, in the fresher stretches of the St. Johns River on the west side of Jacksonville. Once we marked the ledge on his Humminbird, Matt did something I’ve never seen before.

I had wondered all morning why Matt kept casting his 7-foot webbed shrimp net after we had three, then six, then 10 dozen shrimp out from under the Roosevelt Bridge in Ortega. I had asked Matt the night before if he wanted me to bring some live shrimp from the traditional saltwater locations east of the Intracoastal Waterway, and he quickly let me know they would die in a minute if they hit the freshwater we’d be fishing. The shrimp under the Roosevelt Bridge were mostly small, and once we had located one of Matt’s favorite rolldowns from 4 to 16 feet, he employed the oldest trick in the book, which turned out to be brand new to me. Matt pulled a Big Gulp cup out of his console and dipped it into the blacked-out livewell. Chumming with live shrimp suddenly reminded me of using live lobsters as bait for cubera snapper. It just seemed backwards. Be that as it may, I was shocked at how fast big swirls started appearing where the shrimp hit the water.

I love the simplicity of livebait freshwater fishing. A “speckled perch” sized slip cork, a split shot, and a 2/0 kahle hook pinned through the tail of a shrimp, and your drift across Matt’s ledge surely wouldn’t last very long.

I was amazed that the very creeks I had written off as polluted beyond use 40 years ago, were now producing a chunky largemouth on just about every cast. I was perfectly content with what we call “ditch pickles” regularly sucking down our shrimp when Matt suddenly said, “Uh oh, get the net,” as drag started peeling off his tiny spinner. Matt began praying to the fish gods for it to please be a snook, as he had caught a good one in this very spot just a few days earlier. What emerged from the dark water instead was the prettiest copper colored redfish I had ever seen. This fish looked like it had never seen the ocean. It was as copper as a new penny, and as tough as nails.

After a couple more scoops of the Big Gulp cup, and a few more medium largemouths, and a few freshwater catfish, Matt’s drag started screaming again. Snook? No, redfish? No, big largemouth? No. How long could I make this list before I got to a 7-pound tilapia? While I’ve seen a jillion tilapia in the freshwater stretches of the St. Johns River, I’d never seen or heard of one being caught on a live shrimp.

Once the flow of the falling tide started the water pushing our corks along a little more swiftly, Matt was ready to hit the docks along the creek. “What you want for dock fishing is a steady current in 3 to 6 feet of water. Like all dock fishing, the older, and more barnacled the dock, the better.”

We had only thrown one Big Gulp of shrimp when the unmistakable swirl and pop of a snook showed himself clearly. We fired shrimp after shrimp under the dock, and either largemouths or keeper-sized mangrove snapper gobbled them up before the splash of the cork subsided. I have no doubt the snook that showed first had a jolly good time laughing at all the fish we caught, while he watched.

Way too soon we had chummed with all the shrimp we had in the well, and it was time to head back to the Roosevelt Bridge. Once again Matt throttled his Ranger rocket ship to a speed that made it impossible for me to ever figure out exactly where we had fished. I do know that all the creeks we hit were on the westside of Jacksonville. We were surely near my childhood home of the Cedar Hills subdivision. The very same creeks that had floating waste, and very few fish in them, during my childhood.

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