By: Will Korte
My favorite fish in the world is the dolphin. They taste great, they fight hard, they eat flies and they look awesome.
Because of the fact that I’m a poor college student and the fact that I live in Tampa Bay, I never get to fish for these guys. That being said, my second favorite fish is readily available pretty much year round – redfish!
My friend Jarek has the redfish wading game down to a science. Whenever I go home we hop in the water and hit the docks with shrimp and spinning rods! These are the same docks he grew up fishing as a kid. As quietly as possible and while avoiding a minefield of stingrays, we creep up to each dock and try and get our casts right up underneath to waiting fish. Usually you’ll know if anything is there after only a few minutes, these fish want to eat! If not we move on to the next one.
We catch redfish, blackdrum, sheepshead, snook and flounder. Jarek has actually dove these docks and taken videos of all the fish underneath some of these docks, it literally looks like an aquarium at Bass Pro – 3 snook, followed by 2 redfish, followed by a school of sheepshead and going the other direction are more reds!
Last time we went out we crushed it. We caught a few smaller redfish and black drum. Right as we were about to leave Jarek yanked a stud red out!
Getting muddy and wet, silently stalking fish and making pinpoint casts is a fun challenge that really connects you to nature. You see so many cool things, chains of mullet that seem to go on forever, rays and of course the fish you catch.
If you haven’t been out wading before, I highly recommend it you’ll have a great time!
Thanks to Jarek Chrzanowski for all the pics!