The CCBA tourney is a family fishing tournament that I have fish the past 5 years.The format is simple and fun for all. It's main prize money is for trout and redfish and includes cobia and catfish as secondary categories. The past couple years Joe and Billy joined me as the team on my boat. It seems to be a rare thing when 3 guys can spend 3 days aboard a boat and not get on each others needs. It's even better when my two guests are superb fisherman with the drive necessary to fish hard all day while keeping it fun and focused. We headed out Friday morning to prefish (an excuse to tack another day onto the adventure). Since I have been keep tabs on the fish around here we decided to head to some new water and try our luck while expanding our horizons. We went way south to an area that none of us have ever fished before and tested the skinny water at the end of the outgoing tide. We picked an area around a small group of islands and went to work. We found areas the closely resembled productive areas in home waters and we we not disappointed. Started out with a pair of upper slot trout and then a couple reds and found some excellent points and shorelines. The best thing was we duplicated areas by mimicking what we fish around home waters. Its exciting to test ourselves in foreign waters. We then moved closer to home and took several more redfish on the way back. Most of those fish were in the slot.
We decided to meet at 600 to run by the check out point and get to our first stop early. At our 1st stop we hooked a couple fish but both were snook. Snook are not part of the tournament for obvious reasons but it's always nice to hook a linesider in these parts. I was thinking slam at that point. We moved on to our flats looking for a few trout while we waited for the tide to turn to incoming. Joe took a nice 22" trout near dead low tide which turned out to be our biggest trout boated overall. We picked away at the trout and took one here and one there along with a few decent upperslot fish but no real fatties. When the tide shifted to incoming we headed for skinny water and looked for reds and big trout but the incoming tide turned the fish off almost entirely on Saturday and even more so on Sunday.
Sunday was very much like Saturday as we picked through the trout a lot on corks this day and once again Joe had that system down. Billy took the large trout that day and I died with a variety of plugs.
No prize except Joe and I both got a Snook, Redfish, Trout slam on Saturday. The real prize was having the pleasure to spend 3 days fishing with 2 of the best guys I know and both awesome fisherman and friends.
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