Florida Sunshine

I tend to fall into the same mental trap on most family vacations...delusional thoughts that I'm going to get to fish a lot.  It doesn't happen.  Last week, we went to the Bradenton area in Florida to visit family.  As usual, I packed some gear and a few boxes of flies just in case I found time to wet a line.  We spent the majority of our time outdoors looking for shark teeth along the gorgeous beaches of the Venice area.  We found a little over 200 teeth in our two trips to the beaches, so we did pretty well.  This was one of the better specimens I found.

We did make a stop at Jiggs Landing, a historic fish camp on the Braden River not far from where my parents live down there.  It was a neat place, and I would have loved to have had a kayak or paddle board (or time to rent one), but I did catch a few fish from the boardwalk area on the fly.

Pretty much the entire time we were down there, the wind was brutally strong.  It was blowing consistently in the upper teens, with lots of gusts over 20MPH.  Jiggs Landing was a pretty exposed area, at least where I was fishing, so casting and strike detection were chores.

The heart-breaking portion of the trip was when we went to the Riverwalk in Bradenton, located along the Manatee River.  I didn't take my fly rod, unsure of what to expect.  We didn't spot much in the water, but did see a few stingrays making their way along the bottom.

But then we came to the marina area, where there were tons of small baitfish in huge schools.  Of course, I had to spot the school of 1-2lb snook stalking and then blasting these baitfish.  I'm convinced those snook would have attacked about anything that hit the water, and there I was, with nothing.  Look closely and you can see all the shadowy snook about 12-15' away from me.

It was a great time, regardless of the fishing aspect of the trip.  We got to spend some time with my parents, who we had not seen in several months.  My son also got to experience Florida and the beach for the first time.  He really enjoyed trying to taste-test everything he could pick up at the beach.  He also got to rock some shades for the first time in the bright Florida sunshine.