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Taming the high pressure beast
Gonna write up a detailed report below on how we handled the high pressure/full moon duo. For you guys bored at work gonna give you some good reading material and for you guys who have fished post front without much success this might help find a pattern. Cheers.
Wind: 20-30 MPH gusts
Water: Muddy G-Town Brown, no clarity
Time: 7 am - 2pm
Lures: Morning glory everything was the ticket today. Hackberry's and Miss TK's stood out as the best baits overall with top's following a close second. 808 She Dog and the chugger both proved to be very good because they are LOUD. Also, had some huge blow-ups on the black and white spooks but they still seem to want the smaller stuff.
Well, this one was one hell of a remarkable trip. I really didn't wanna go out because we had three things going against us:
1) High Pressure
2) Day after cold front
3) Full Moon
LOL. Ok, so this crazy Asian (Jhua) convinces me to get out on the water and it took some heavy persuading but I couldn't resist. He made a good point and said that we know our spots produce pre-front and we know we can catch fish then...so why not learn how to catch fish post front as well? It was a good point and it was a huge proving ground for us (competing against ourselves not other anglers of course).
We got out on the water ~7 AM and it was ROUGH. The wind was howling 20-30 MPH gusts, the sun quickly rose high in the sky and the water was REALLY muddied up. On the way out I put both my poles in the boat, one armed with the pearl skitter and the other with the black spook and Jhua makes a comment about me starting out with tops during high pressure - NO PROBLEM! Lol. He had both of his poles rigged with hackberry's in morning glory and I definitely was having some second thoughts since the high pressure SHOULD be keeping fish down in the water column...wasn't the case trout are pigs.
Report: We started out at one of our favorite spots which is a muddy bottomed flat. I started out throwing the 808 She Dog for a couple reasons. The extra hi-pitch this lure puts out is unbelievable if you use it to your advantage. Basically, when retrieving this bait instead of working it walk-the-dog like a conventional top water with just some wrist action, you want to rip this thing from left to right to emit that hi pitch to the max and fish WILL find it. It's slowly becoming my favorite top water once I've figured out how to use it to it's potential. The pearl skitterwalk has been my go-to for a while but it's just way too hard to work in 20-30 MPH winds. The reason I chose 808 was because it has a lot of things going for it 1) Super loud sound for windy mud chop 2) Dark colors and an orange belly easy to spot for hungry trout 3) chrome sides since the sun was crushing us. Lately when we have been getting some dark cloud cover, choppy muddy water, and when the winds have really been howling I've actually been throwing the she-dog in black/chart with much better success than the black spook which conventional wisdom would have went against. Hi pitch is unreal.
Jhua decided to go with the chugger. No idea who makes this thing he'll have to post it up but it's pretty cool. You basically just sloosh it through the water hard to make it throw wake and trout will find it. It doesn't have any rattles but it's big and loud in the water but makes me paranoid because it keeps sounding like I'm hearing blowups but it's just his lure....oh well.
We cast onto the flats and he hooks up with me shortly behind. We got into some big 23-24" trout early but nothing bigger. We caught and released all 4 or 5 of them since the rule on the boat between us two is any trout over 20" is going back unless it's a flounder or a red.
The early morning bite didn't last long until we really had to figure out where these trout went during high pressure. We had two options, either follow the tide inward (low tide) or move way out against it. We decided that we needed to find some channels because maybe the trout were holding deep. Lately we have been on some nice trout in a particular area so we knew this high pressure either pushed them back into the bays or out into the gulf and it's a good thing we chose the back bays because we were right.
We tucked back into the bays, found a channel and went to work. Jhua was DUSTING me off with the morning glory hackberrys. Holy crap that's a good bait and it almost made me want to stop throwing the Miss TK's but I know they work so I kept throwing the morning glory Miss TK.
Jhua just hooking up left and right down deep and in the middle columns of the channel and the bite stopped. We probably snagged 4-5 trout there and moved on.
We went to the back of the bays and we knew that if we DIDN'T find them this time, we could X this off on a mental note and we'd find them going out the other way next time after high pressure. We tucked back into a shallow cut we named Hackberry Bayou (go figure if you can't guess why it's named hackberry bayou you don't deserve to know about it!) We absolutely slammed the trout there on soft plastics along the bank edges.
One thing I've learned with these miss TK's is that you don't want to be afraid to double pop these things harder than you think. These things have awesome action in the water....when you pop the hell out of it. If you put them up next to a boat you can get it to dart very erratically side to side if you pop it with some force. It took me about 30 minutes to an hour of varying my retrieve before I got it but they wanted super hard double jerks, you would just slowly reel in after that and they would barely bite it - the bite was very fickle but you basically just waited till you felt the weight and just set the hook the best you could and pray he was on.
Anyways, we grinded it out picking up 3-4 trout on each drift till we finished with limits from 7am-2pm. I'm sure Jhua will have a ton more to add in his post. Tried to make the report as detailed as possible without giving away any spots. If you liked this report I'll do more of them this way from now on (assuming people read them all this far). We threw every trout over 20" back so essentially we got quite a bit more than our limit, especially with tons of dinks getting thrown back.
Here's some pics of our double hook-ups both flopped in the boat off the topwater/chugger combos and a picture of Jhua with a nice 23" trout he caught on the chug a lug (sorry couldn't turn it). Cheers.
Wind: 20-30 MPH gusts
Water: Muddy G-Town Brown, no clarity
Time: 7 am - 2pm
Lures: Morning glory everything was the ticket today. Hackberry's and Miss TK's stood out as the best baits overall with top's following a close second. 808 She Dog and the chugger both proved to be very good because they are LOUD. Also, had some huge blow-ups on the black and white spooks but they still seem to want the smaller stuff.
Well, this one was one hell of a remarkable trip. I really didn't wanna go out because we had three things going against us:
1) High Pressure
2) Day after cold front
3) Full Moon
LOL. Ok, so this crazy Asian (Jhua) convinces me to get out on the water and it took some heavy persuading but I couldn't resist. He made a good point and said that we know our spots produce pre-front and we know we can catch fish then...so why not learn how to catch fish post front as well? It was a good point and it was a huge proving ground for us (competing against ourselves not other anglers of course).
We got out on the water ~7 AM and it was ROUGH. The wind was howling 20-30 MPH gusts, the sun quickly rose high in the sky and the water was REALLY muddied up. On the way out I put both my poles in the boat, one armed with the pearl skitter and the other with the black spook and Jhua makes a comment about me starting out with tops during high pressure - NO PROBLEM! Lol. He had both of his poles rigged with hackberry's in morning glory and I definitely was having some second thoughts since the high pressure SHOULD be keeping fish down in the water column...wasn't the case trout are pigs.
Report: We started out at one of our favorite spots which is a muddy bottomed flat. I started out throwing the 808 She Dog for a couple reasons. The extra hi-pitch this lure puts out is unbelievable if you use it to your advantage. Basically, when retrieving this bait instead of working it walk-the-dog like a conventional top water with just some wrist action, you want to rip this thing from left to right to emit that hi pitch to the max and fish WILL find it. It's slowly becoming my favorite top water once I've figured out how to use it to it's potential. The pearl skitterwalk has been my go-to for a while but it's just way too hard to work in 20-30 MPH winds. The reason I chose 808 was because it has a lot of things going for it 1) Super loud sound for windy mud chop 2) Dark colors and an orange belly easy to spot for hungry trout 3) chrome sides since the sun was crushing us. Lately when we have been getting some dark cloud cover, choppy muddy water, and when the winds have really been howling I've actually been throwing the she-dog in black/chart with much better success than the black spook which conventional wisdom would have went against. Hi pitch is unreal.
Jhua decided to go with the chugger. No idea who makes this thing he'll have to post it up but it's pretty cool. You basically just sloosh it through the water hard to make it throw wake and trout will find it. It doesn't have any rattles but it's big and loud in the water but makes me paranoid because it keeps sounding like I'm hearing blowups but it's just his lure....oh well.
We cast onto the flats and he hooks up with me shortly behind. We got into some big 23-24" trout early but nothing bigger. We caught and released all 4 or 5 of them since the rule on the boat between us two is any trout over 20" is going back unless it's a flounder or a red.
The early morning bite didn't last long until we really had to figure out where these trout went during high pressure. We had two options, either follow the tide inward (low tide) or move way out against it. We decided that we needed to find some channels because maybe the trout were holding deep. Lately we have been on some nice trout in a particular area so we knew this high pressure either pushed them back into the bays or out into the gulf and it's a good thing we chose the back bays because we were right.
We tucked back into the bays, found a channel and went to work. Jhua was DUSTING me off with the morning glory hackberrys. Holy crap that's a good bait and it almost made me want to stop throwing the Miss TK's but I know they work so I kept throwing the morning glory Miss TK.
Jhua just hooking up left and right down deep and in the middle columns of the channel and the bite stopped. We probably snagged 4-5 trout there and moved on.
We went to the back of the bays and we knew that if we DIDN'T find them this time, we could X this off on a mental note and we'd find them going out the other way next time after high pressure. We tucked back into a shallow cut we named Hackberry Bayou (go figure if you can't guess why it's named hackberry bayou you don't deserve to know about it!) We absolutely slammed the trout there on soft plastics along the bank edges.
One thing I've learned with these miss TK's is that you don't want to be afraid to double pop these things harder than you think. These things have awesome action in the water....when you pop the hell out of it. If you put them up next to a boat you can get it to dart very erratically side to side if you pop it with some force. It took me about 30 minutes to an hour of varying my retrieve before I got it but they wanted super hard double jerks, you would just slowly reel in after that and they would barely bite it - the bite was very fickle but you basically just waited till you felt the weight and just set the hook the best you could and pray he was on.
Anyways, we grinded it out picking up 3-4 trout on each drift till we finished with limits from 7am-2pm. I'm sure Jhua will have a ton more to add in his post. Tried to make the report as detailed as possible without giving away any spots. If you liked this report I'll do more of them this way from now on (assuming people read them all this far). We threw every trout over 20" back so essentially we got quite a bit more than our limit, especially with tons of dinks getting thrown back.
Here's some pics of our double hook-ups both flopped in the boat off the topwater/chugger combos and a picture of Jhua with a nice 23" trout he caught on the chug a lug (sorry couldn't turn it). Cheers.
COMMUNITY WITH A LARGE
PROBLEM AND A 
PROBLEM.
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