February Fish Tails by Capt. Charlie Beadon

Sheepshead or Redfish?

Running down the river we could feel the cold chill of winter seeping through our jackets, but damn the cold, we’re on a mission to catch dinner. We pull up to the old sheepshead dock and you can still see the clusters of barnacles growing on the pilings as the tide slowly rises to cover them up. I set the anchor to get us in the right position and we start to ease our fiddler crabs slowly to the bottom…bam…bam…bam, were tripled up! I think this may be the quickest sheepshead triple that I’ve ever seen; they must be thick down there. After an hour of steady sheepshead action one of my buddies hooks into something big, I mean really big and we start the “piling shuffle”. How we managed to keep this mystery fish on as it weaves in and out of the dock pilings is beyond me, but somehow we get it into open water. After a thirty minute fight on light tackle we finally get a good look at the bruiser, “it’s a big red fish” my buddy cries! A big redfish indeed, this sucker weighed in at 35 pounds before we released it. How about that to finish up a sheepshead trip. To hear more tails of whoppers and mishaps give me a call and let’s put together a fishing trip and until then “catch em up”!