The Dump

I got a text from my nephew about 10:30 in the morning. He asked me if I wanted to go with him to work out. He was going to target his biceps, triceps and core area. I knew immediately what he was referring to. It was one day after a front had passed through with strong northerly winds blowing after its passage. The temperature was in the mid forties and the water temperature was in the upper fifties. This meant the back lakes had lost all their water and the fish would be concentrated in the mouths of the drains. This loss of water and extremely low tides and water levels is called “The Dump” by many fishermen. Many times the action can be nonstop as the the fish stack up in deeper water adjacent to the flats or back lakes. The exercise he was referring to was the nonstop action of catching redfish on every cast.

I promptly responded “I’m in” and loaded up the truck and headed out. We loaded up the boat for the short run to his favorite drain. The wind had laid down, and the sky remained overcast all day. The timing was perfect as this was a new moon phase which is usually a good time to go fishing. When we arrived, we saw very low water levels and a dropping tide. Navigation was sketchy as we weaved through patches of oysters trying to stay in the deeper water of the channel. Upon arrival, we did not see any signs of bait moving in the water. The main drain had a very slow moving current going out. We put the trolling motor down and began casting soft plastics as we approached the mouth. In the first five to six casts, my nephew caught three redfish. We slipped the anchor over the side of the boat at 2:30 that afternoon and began an unbelievable afternoon of fishing. In the first fifteen minutes, we put six keeper redfish in the ice chest. From that point on and without moving from this spot, we continued to catch and release one red fish after another. It seemed like the more we caught the more aggressive they ate. It was literally every cast, and often times, as soon as our lure hit the water we were hooked up with another redfish. It was not uncommon to have a double hook up happening all afternoon. It became so easy that we experimented with different lures to see what they would eat and what they would not eat.

The soft plastics we used were primarily Down South Lures using darker colors. Once we got them fired up, the glow and chartreuse was also very effective. We also caught them on topwater lures using the Spook Junior and a Sixth Sense wake bait. The only thing we had to do with these topwater baits was to pause the bait for a second and work it slowly in between pauses. It is always a blast to see the wake of an eight pound redfish behind your topwater lure and anticipating the strike. We were laughing loudly as a redfish would lurch on top of our lures with its back out of the water. We also caught them on Hot Rods which are slow sinking twitch baits. Twitching the bait and letting it fall caused a violent attack that would almost jerk the rod out of our hands. The other bait we tried was a white and chartreuse chatter bait with a gold blade. We could bump this bait off the bottom, if it made it there, and pull it slowly over the shell and mud. The loud vibration drew some hard thumps as they grabbed it and went screaming across the shell. We had to reel like crazy to catch up with the slack line before they broke the line off on the sharp edges of the oysters.

The action was nonstop. We lost our daylight and the tide had started to turn as the west wind was starting to blow. We slowly navigated our way back though the mouth of the drain and headed back to civilization. We kept a running tally of how many redfish we caught in that three hour excursion. You might find it unbelievable, but we caught one hundred and forty one redfish in that amount of time and kept six for the supper table. My nephew caught the largest weighing in at 15 pounds on the boga and measuring 33 inches.

We also caught two 11 pounders, one 10 pounder, two 9’s and hundreds of 5 to 8 pound redfish. I would say the average fish for the day ran about 6 pounds. Needless to say we did get that workout he was wanting and brought home some good groceries on top of that. Here is a short video of the fun we had that day in God’s great outdoors.

Here are a few more pics from that day.

This was a trip for the record books of our memory and will be hard to top until the next “Dump”. Get outdoors and enjoy God’s creations and breathe in some fresh air.

Thanks for reading my blog. God bless you and stay safe. Psalm 34:3

Tim Lumpkin

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