Last trip to the Elizabeth...

Since I had to work on Good Friday my scheduled plans for fishing that day were cancelled - so I thought...

I decided to call my good friend Richie and see what his plans were for Saturday. We quickly decided that we should make another run to the Elizabeth River for some speckled trout. Richie had just entered the Virginia Fish Tagging program and was really wanting to get some of these tags on some fish... Check out his link here - Hook Line & Sinker.

I quickly got a little tweaked off when traffic was at a stand still on 64 and after sitting in that for an hour I finally arrived at Richie's to load up the vehicles.

We arrived at the launch and a few fellow kayakers were just returning with just a few strikes and no fish landed. One kayaker told me had a 30" + on his kayak last week and was taking a picture when she went bat crazy thrashing around and flopped over the side. He was back trying to get some revenge on the gator!

I've had some great success on the Elizabeth River this year. In the last 6 months I have landed 8 Virginia Citations so I was pretty confident that we'd get on the fish.

One of my favorite methods to finding fish is trolling plastics. Once I locate some fish I work that area over good and then move on to another location. One key piece of equipment that I won't leave home without is my Lowrance Elite 4X fishfinder. Once I locate the baitfish it's game on!

I started off trolling two of my favorite Rapala jerkbaits and landed a little guy right off the bat!

I casted plastics for about 10 minutes without another bite and decided it was time to move on. I was fishing in about 3ft of water when I got another hit and landed my first ever VA Tagged Speckled Trout. This was not a big fish by any means but still pretty cool to land a fish with a tag! I took the numbers down on the tag and released her back to be caught another day.

I proceeded to landed 11 trout that ranged from 15"-19" and two small stripers. Soft plastics and jerkbaits are still getting it done on the Elizabeth. This is probably my last trip to the ER until the fall so until then...