Well, as it goes, I'm taking the family down to Florida for a little family reunion. I was asked by my wife, and parents to not make this a fishing trip, but a family trip as they had a lot planned for us. I agreed, but crossed my fingers behind my back when I said, "Not a fishing trip."
We got to the airport, and everything went smoothly.
Point Loma
Mission Bay
The only issue was the plane was loaded with sniffling snot nosed kids all going to Disneyland. No chance I'm not getting sick after this non-stop flight.
Get to Orlando and it was a fiasco getting our rental car. If you ever are told by Expedia to use NU car rentals.... run away. Not worth it.
We finally start our hour-long ride north to the monstrous retirement community (The Villages). We get there pretty late, but were warmly greeted by my folks who I haven't seen in a while.
Stories were shared and wine was had before hitting the sack.
I woke up in the morning and said I was going to take a quick walk to get my exercise in and I could see some stink eye from everyone. They know that I know there are bodies of water nearby.... lol
I walked down to a pretty sterile looking retaining pond. It looked like a bigger version of Santee Lakes and doing the same thing. I heard something loud in the distance coming at me and saw what looked like a flying witch drop down on me! It landed and started calling for its buddies. He was definitely not scared of me!
In order to shorten this a bit, I'll skip all of the family fun and functions we were doing, but I pulled out my little pea-shooter and telescoping rod I hid in the suitcase. She never saw it when I had the suitcase open on the bed and packing my clothes. Glorious.
I had an hour before we were going to dinner, and I could get ready in a minute, so I grabbed the rod and MC swimbait and ran to see what was what. You could tell this pond was put in recently. No grass on the bottom, no nothing. It was unusually cold and murky, but I saw a ton of rain bait swimming around. Unfortunately I also lost a few MC's to this terrible crab that expanded the length of the lake.
Everything had to be off the bottom when fished and it wasn't a very deep lake.
The lake was low as they were also in a drought, but every cast I would get netting. I saw 3 alligators from 8-10 feet in the other lake close by, but didn't see one here. In any case, I didn't like walking into murky water to retrieve my swimbait back. I didn't bring a whole lot of tackle.
EVERYWHERE!
I then saw what I thought were bluegill, but didn't have anything with me to target them. I walked the entire length of the lake when I saw something chasing bait at the surface and it looked big! It looked like a brown tail, but I never got a good eye on it.
I kept casting the chartreuse MC when I get slammed! WTF?!?!?! This is going to be interesting, but I had to get back asap to get ready for dinner. Unfortunately, no head lamp and alligators around meant no sneaking out at night and trying to fish....
Had a fabulous dinner with the family and folks and it was one of many great meals that week. They really have some good food there which was going to be expanding my waistline. Well, It looks like I was going to visit their place that's getting renovated, and I KNOW there is some old growth swamp and ponds there, so I pre-packed the trunk with my gear so no one knew had a clue.
Bring on the SWAMP!
