There's hope in Hopedale (a report)

What's up, guys? Another fishing report means another video and here's the link to that as always.

I got lucky and had a day off on Monday and as my luck would have it, that coincided with the best weather we've had in half a year. The wind would be low, the temps would be low, and the tide wouldn't start falling until dead noon. Perfect conditions for sight fishing.

With all that in my pocket, I left the house around 8 am after dropping the kid off at daycare and then made my way to Hopedale Marina. No one was launching when I was, but the lot was packed.

After dodging about a million other boats, I made my way deep into the marsh and focused completely on duck ponds emptying into larger bodies of water. The tide was 2' up heading towards .5' down so I knew the reds would be way back in the duck ponds and sure enough, that's where they were. Everywhere I looked there were reds.

The reds didn't seem to be feeding. The larger reds would attack the lure, as they always do, but the eater sizes had to be coaxed. That's the story of the day, if I wanted them to hit the lure, it had to be put on a platter for them. This was true of the gold spoon and true of the shrimp imitation lure I had on. If it was pulled at even a leisurely pace - you would not get a hit. Regardless, it was great to see so many reds out there. I hooked at least 8 reds, must have seen upwards of 20 and who knows how many I spooked - all in about .5 a square mile. It's been a while since I could say that and total time it took to catch a limit was about two hours.

If you've read these reports or seen my videos before, you know I care about conservation and participate in tagging programs. I've tagged so many fish in this area that I saw a few reds swimming with tags in them (almost certainly mine) meaning if you let them go they'll be very close to where you caught them when you come back. If you're like me, that's even more incentive to only take what you need and come back for more fun later.

So that's what I'll be doing middle of next week when I hope to have another report to share with y'all on a return trip. I promise not to use a gold spoon on that trip lol. Until then, please check out the video. As always, thanks for reading. I enjoy these posts and feel very lucky to get to have and share these experiences.

Check out the video.