Ready to Rumble

It's snowing in Pinedale. Again. And it looks like it'll keep doing that more or less all this week. I was planning on heading to Texas to chase reds and bass but unfortunately the trip got canceled and left me stuck in the frozen north. Oh wait, no it didn't. After some last-minute scrambling, a plan was formulated. I'm heading down to Florida to meet up with my buddy Stu for an epic week of chasing whatever swims. The plan for now is to hit up big bass, tailing redfish and some hefty seatrout for a day then blast down to the Keys and get salty. We'll try to find some peacock bass on the way down in some of the freshwater canals in south Fl. Neither of us has targeted them specifically before, so it could be good or a complete disaster. Hopefully it's the former.

We're looking at hitting a few different places in the Keys. It's the beginning of prime time for the big 3 down there: tarpon, bonefish, and permit. There are also a bunch of lesser targeted fish to keep us occupied if the classics aren't cooperating. Snapper, snook, sharks, you name it. My outlook: if it swims in front of me, it gets hit with a fly. We'll end up at mile 0 in Key West and may even head out to the Maraquesas for some less traveled flats before turning around and heading north again to meet up with Stu's brother and a little offshore action in the Gulf.

That's a lot of fishing. And we've got a week to do it, which means we're going to be totally fried by the end of it. My last trip to the Keys was pretty much a blowout, with heavy winds making fishing extremely difficult. The weather outlook this time looks a lot better. Even so, I'll probably be checking the updates all day tomorrow as I'm sitting in airports. One of the big problems with living in the middle of nowhere is the simple fact that "you can't get there from here, ayuh." There's pretty much no way to get a direct flight to anywhere. Oh well. I'll post updates as we go and there will be plenty of pictures and possible video. Stay tuned...