Jacksonville FL 05/14-15/08 w/ Captain Ron Schurr

I got an invite from bigbendfishing.net headmaster (Tom Keels) to go fishing with Capt Ron Schurr from http://www.fishingnorthflorida.com in Jacksonville, FL. A time and date was made and a plan was set in motion.

Day 1 – The Trip over: Left the Redneck Riviera and headed to Tallahassee to pick up Tom. Birddog meet up with me at Tom’s to give me a lil spending money. We chit chatted for a few moments then loaded our gear and headed east.

Arrived in Jacksonville around 3:00 and checked into the Hampton. Capt. Ron called and we meet him at his house, which was right around the corner. We headed to the ramp for an afternoon assault on the Jacksonville estuary.

Wind was blowing like I had the fly rod in the boat, but I didn’t. First stop resulted in some really fat trout. Tom caught several nice trout, as well Ron, I was being the gracious guest and letting them get some before I stepped up to the plate.

Tom with a nice trout and nice visor

Tom with another nice trout and visor

Tom with another nice trout

I finally decided to dangle my pinky in the water and enticed a nice trout to bite…look at the gut on that fish

Captain Ron got into the action with a nice football shaped trout

Tom catches another solid Jacksonville trout

The “Release”

We moved to a few other spots picking up a fish or two along the way. Capt Ron showed us around the area. We fished to dusk and into the night, finally calling it quits about 9:30 or so.

After loading the boat, Captain Ron recommended Mudville Grille in Jacksonville for a nice cool adult beverage and a bite to eat. I had a Patty Melt and a Yuengling on draft, man that was some awesome food. If you’re in Jacksonville you need to check out Mudville good food and great atmosphere. Tell them that Capt Ron Schurr sent you and ask Heather Isbell for some good fishing spots.

Day 2 – Gold Spoons Revenge: We met Captain Ron at the ramp at 0700 for another blitzkrieg on the salt marshes surrounding Jacksonville. Today’s foe was the willy redfish and anything else that wanted to bite.

First spot we pulled up on I pulled out my trusty piece of flat metal with a hook. Captain Ron gave me the stink eye, telling me I had to “Gulp’m to get’m here in Jacksonville.” I told him to sit back and watch…five or so casts into the morning, the line goes taught and the ever so familiar feeling of dead weight and then the head shake. I just smiled as Capt Ron netted the first red of the day.

Captain Ron looks at me and he says, “I hate you and your gold spoon.” We all bust out into laughter. I have been telling Captain Ron about the spoon for two years now. He says he can’t ever get them to bite the spoon, I told him he needs to believe. No sooner than I had caught the first red, I lock into another short red on the spoon, all Ron would do was chuckle. I told him it’s so easy a caveman could do it.

We ran through some bridges and into a maze of creeks and oyster bars. This place looks so fishy it would take a lifetime to fish all the fishy looking spots. We end up rolling through some creeks looking for some more reds. We fished some awesome looking spots, looking for something to pull our string.

I caught a nice fat trout.

Captain Ron managed a nice trout as well

Tom hooked up with a nice trout on a BiteABait

I took some video of us running through the maze of creeks.

And then this lil guy decided to fly into my line and got all tangled up.

Some more of the bird

We managed to catch the bird and unwrap it and send it away unharmed.

Then I thought I had locked into an oversized red, but it turned out to be a 6 lb flounder

Slippery flat fish was hard to hold

Thanks for the invite Tom; I had a blast look forward to doing it again.

Special thanks to Captain Ron Schurr for being a great sponsor to the website. I got to know Ron about two years ago. We talked on the phone a year before we ever met. I have fished with him twice and showed him how the gold spoon works, hopefully he will come around.

If you ever get over towards Jacksonville and want to catch some fish be sure to look up Capt. Ron Schurr (http://www.fishingnorthflorida.com). He will show you a good time no doubt about it.

IFA Tournament 05/10/08

It all started with a phone call about eight or so months ago…

I normally talk to Birddog once a day; usually to discuss what’s happening on the forum, talk about fishing, boats and related stuff. During one of these conversations we started talking about fishing the IFA. It went something like do you want to do it, I say yes, and it went from there.

I started fishing around the bay almost three months ago trying to find some new or better spots than I already had. This was probably the most painful part of the process, fishing areas I didn’t like or didn’t think was worthy, which was mostly the case.

Two weeks prior to the tournament Birddog and me started checking some of my good spots. We really had a good two days of fishing that weekend. We had 14.5 lbs on Saturday and 14 lbs on Sunday. These weights would be good in most any redfish tournament. To bad it wasn’t during the tournament, here are some pics from the practice weekend.

One week before the tournament we go check some more of those spots that are considered “good”, which they were not for the most part. We happened to see the “Mogan” man come by the first morning on his way to St. Joe bay.

We fished a few spots on Saturday and managed to pick up several nice trout and a few good reds, here are some pics of the fish.

We left out again on Sunday of this weekend with a fat head and sore arms, but we hoped our perseverance and time on the water would pay off. A front had passed through during the night and we knew it would be tough. We managed to catch a few nice trout and found two schools of redfish not willing to eat.

Weekend of the tournament rolls around and we decide to fish some on Thursday to see if we could verify fish were still around our spots. The wind was forecast to blow 10-15 and gusting to 20. It was a rough ride around the bay, but we managed to find a few fish on our spots. On Friday we chilled out working on the boat and getting our tackle ready. We went to the Captains meeting at Edgewater resort. Got to talk to Jason Melvin, Capt Pete and Paul Chavis.

Tournament day – Birddog arrives at my house and we hook up the boat and hit the road at 5:00. We launched the boat and milled around waiting on our number to be called. The location for the boat tech was kinda in a bad spot, we had to go with the wind and then turn 90 degrees to our starboard side. Anyone with a flat bottom boat will realize this not a good scenario in close quarters. After we bounced off the dock and a few boats we made it out alive .

I had found one spot that had an enormous amount of mullet and a few nice redfish, we stopped there first. The mullet was there, but only ladyfish and blefish were on the scene, so we left. Second spot had somewhere between 5-8 boats on it. We did see a small school of reds, but they were running for cover.

Ashley Mock told me about a spot they had found, we confirmed with him that we had caught a few fish near that spot two weeks prior. We were not able to check this spot, but with one of our good spots wrapped up with boats we needed to find a boatless spot. We arrived at the spot and landed a fish with in the first few casts and then another. The pressure was off. The biggest fear for both of us was not catching anything and looking more foolish than normal. We ended up upgrading our fish twice on this one drift. We had attracted some company, so we didn’t want to show our hand and left to goto another spot.

Fourth spot produced a few fish but nothing to upgrade what we had, so we left.

Fifth spot produced alot of wind and boat noise, so we left and went back our third spot. We ended up catching a few more fish that went around 5 lbs each, but not good enough to upgrade. We decided to quite fishing at 2:00 and head back to the weigh in.

We ended up catching 15- 20 reds during the day. We caught all the fish on Capt Mike’s spoons and Bayou Buck Spinnerbaits rigged on Challenger rods and Shimano reels from South Georgia Outdoors in Cairo Georgia.

The weigh in – We check in and beat on the dock again We finally find a place to tie up the boat and go get fish bags. Birddog took on the daunting task of wrestling two lively reds out of the livewell and into the fish bags. We get inline at the scales, actually I think we broke inline We weigh our fish and talk to Jerry for a moment and have our pictures made by Big Mike.

We had 12.03 lbs, we figured we would have a 20th place finish. We were glad to have that, enjoyed the event and was looking forward to the next event. We were talking to our wives and drinking a few beers to knock the edge off from the days event. I decided to go get the truck keys and my phone out of the boat. I come strolling back up and see my entourage doing the bobble head looking for me and waving their arms. I walk up and say, “What’s up?” Birddog, “Says we are in the money.”

We ended up 6th place…We went up and accepted our check and spoke with Jerry.

We got to speak with Paul Chavis, hell of a nice guy.

We would like to thank our sponsors we couldn’t of done this without them: Capital City Bank, Grand Panama Beach Resorts, Paradise Bar and Grill, Pickett’s Landing, Challenger Performance Tackle, South Georgia Outdoors and Bite-A-Bait.

Special thanks to our families for their support.

Enjoyed Birddog can’t wait til next time.