A long overdue report from Hopedale.

What's up y'all? Thanks as always for reading. Most of us are about to be rained in for the forseeable future so I figure why not use this time to write a report? As always, there's a video that comes with this.

This trip was last Saturday, after a full moon. We would have a falling tide all day, calm winds until noon, and we hadn't had a lot of weather for over a week. Everything looked perfect and I took this chance to see if the shrimp are out yet and if the trout are moving back out.

Now I don't know if it was Covid brain or just being over excited to finally be back on the water, but I made perhaps the dumbest mistake of my fishing career - I forgot to get gas. Luckily, I have sea tow, but it still took a few hours for them to get to me and those hours were the prime fishing times. So, with that prime time lost, I had to start grinding to make something out of the day.

I tried a few lures. I threw a DOA under a cork, and a DOA free lined. Nothing going on that. I tried a spoon as well, again nothing. The only thing that worked for me was the HH cocahoe in tuxedo that I've thrown all winter. This is becoming my favorite lure, but I think the time for shrimp imitation and spoons is coming soon.

Overall I didn't find a huge feeding frenzy anywhere, but that's ok, because what I did find was a new PB trout. To some of you, 22 inches may not be much but to me I'm just learning trout and this is a beast.

The first key to finding that fish, and all the others was being nimble. Being smart and fast was the key. I only kept three trout on the day, landed a few more and a couple of reds (a few didn't make it into the video because of batteries dying). The second key was retreiving SLOW. You can see for every fish I caught, I stopped the bait. I only noticed that in editing and I wish I had noticed that in the moment.

All in all, I learned a good bit that I can use when the weather clears. First, when cleaning the trout, I had a 13, 14, and 16. The smaller ones had baby shrimp in their bellies but the bigger one had a digested mullet. Not necessarily surprising for the big one, but it was good to see shrimp are showing up for the smaller trout.

Based on this, I would say we have just a couple more weeks until big trout on top water will be on the menu. I can't wait.

Thanks for reading as always. I like writing these and making these videos, and I hope you guys enjoy reading and watching.