It's October, so go fishing

If I could pick a month that I wanted to last forever it would be
October. Freshwater as well as saltwater fish either are biting like mad
or it won't be long before they will be. Have you noticed the
mockingbirds are singing again? It has been months since we heard them
sing, due to the heat.

A lot of things in nature start moving around during October. The
flounder start their annual migration to the gulf to spawn. King
mackerel and pompano have started their migrations south. Right now the
gulf is full of kings as well as Spanish mackerel. The Spanish are
running so large (six to nine pounds) that the average fisherman can't
tell the difference between the two. Don't use the spots as an
indicator.

A lot of fishermen will hold up a mackerel and look to see if it has a
black tip on its fins and is covered with black spots to determine
whether or not it is a Spanish. Don't always depend on this method
because an undersized king mackerel may fool you. Use the lateral line
that runs down both sides to determine which kind of mackerel it is.

Unless the fish has been damaged at some time in its life the lateral
line on a Spanish will run almost straight down the side from the head
to the tail. On a king it will run halfway down and then turn noticeably
and continue on toward the tail.

We have been fishing for king mackerel out of kayaks for the past three
afternoons. It's a simple process. Just drag your kayak down to the
beach, paddle out several hundred yards to catch some cigar minnows with
a gold-hook rig and cast one out and hold on. You will have a hookup in
no time.

The only problem with this method lately is catching the bait. For some
reason, baitfish close to shore virtually have disappeared. You can
solve that problem by taking several dead minnows with you until you
catch some live ones.

We lent Mr. Stoutamire one of our sit-inside kayaks last Friday for his
first outing and he did quite well. There are two varieties of kayaks:
sit on top or sit inside. If you have seen a picture of an Eskimo in a
kayak it probably was the sit-inside variety. This type can fill with
water and sink, but the newer models of sit on top shed water like a
duck.

I noticed that Stoutamire's kayak seemed to be getting lower in the
water as the sun was sinking below the horizon. He kept complaining that
he needed a bucket to bail out the water. It was a little rough Friday
afternoon and we had another sit-inside kayak with us. Because it was
not filling with water so we sort of blew it off to his inexperience. It
turned out Stoutamire's kayak had a hole in it and he actually was
sinking. It was a good thing we were only a quarter-mile off the beach
or we could have lost a good kayak.

For some reason he was the only one to catch a king and caught three.
In my opinion, October is the best month for fishing and that includes
bass fishing. Everyone has their own way to fish for bass from plastic
worms to shiners. It can be an 18-foot bass boat with a 200-horse motor
or a 14-foot jonboat with a 9-horse. The trouble with a big boat is it
requires big water. A smaller lighter boat can be pulled across logs
enabling the angler to reach unfished water.

There are several ways to fish from a boat. You can fish from point A
to point B in a bass boat going very fast and travel many miles in a
short time. You can launch a small boat in a small river and motor up
and down the river fishing a smaller area. Or you can do as a couple of
fishermen did this weekend and fish the way it was done before outboard
motors were in vogue.

This is called drift fishing. Put in at a point upriver and drift to
another point downriver. Doing this in the summer and doing it in the
fall can be different experiences on the same stretch of river. What
took 10 hours in June also will take 10 hours in October with one
exception. In October you run out of daylight sooner and you can't
lollygag around like you can in the summer.