Black Drum!

My pole doubled over, and I lifted my pole out of the holder and starting to fight the fish. As sometimes happens, my other pole went off as another black drum decided to join the party. Somehow, I managed to lose both fish, which is unusual as I was using circle hooks. It didn’t matter as I was soon fighting another fish.

We had returned from Florida to near freezing temperatures, rare for the Coastal Bend of South Texas. Combined with strong northern winds, it was just too nasty to go fishing. To make matters worse many of our friends were recovering from the flu

Thankfully, everyone recovered from the flu and so when the weather warmed up, John invited Dwayne and I to go fishing. His boat ran great as we headed to one of his favorite spots. Casting out dead shrimp, Dwayne caught and released several small rat reds, (under size red fish), before John and then I also caught one. John also caught an undersized black drum, so we decided to move to another one of his spots.

Our friend’s Dave and Terri, were also fishing near there and so we anchored some ways away, making sure we wouldn’t spook their fish. John cast out and before long hooked and landed a legal black drum! As the water warmed, the fish became more active and we were all catching black drum.

Now I think that black drum is one of the best eating salt water fish, but I say that about almost every fish that I catch, (except bluefish which are ok when cooked right). All of us were thinking of a fresh black drum fish fry, and as the day wore on we caught more fish!

We caught our limit of nice black drum, now all we had to do was fillet them. John rinsed his boat as Dwayne and I filleted the fish. The electricity is still out on our dock and, so we had to resort to using small Rapala fillet knives, (our truck was in the repair shop and my good Dexter Russell Fillet knife was under the back seat).

John returned to help us to finish filleting the fish, and we bagged the fillets into three bags, one for each of us. Later I fried the fish using a southern crispy fish recipe, and Renita and I enjoyed an all you can eat fish fry. A day doesn’t end much better!  Clear skies