The money fish on the Florida flats is the speckled trout and the redfish. There are plenty of other fun fish to target, but these two are by far the most popular to anglers. What makes these fish so popular is they are plentiful, put up a good fight, and are great table fare. Speckle trout are really pretty fish. They have several spots along their body, thus the name, and are usually green and a silvery brown in color. They are easy to filet and are especially good pan fried in vegetable oil. Usually you know when you’ve hooked one, because they give their head a violent shake once you get a hook set. The big ones folks call ‘gator trout’. This might be because they have two sharp teeth in the top of their mouth, and its generally a good idea to make sure you have a pair of pliers when you go fishing for them.

Anglers use several different techniques to catch these fish. One of the most common is to drift along the grass flats using a live shrimp attached to a leader behind a popping cork. These corks pop when you jerk the rod tip, causing a commotion in the water that can drive fish wild. Generally you tie a leader onto the bottom of the cork 12- 18 inches long. This may vary though depending upon water depth and density of the grass. Trout love to hang out around potholes and around patches of sand. They hide in the available grass and ambush their prey.

Other great baits for trout include top water lures, live pinfish, and Berkley’s scented gulp shrimp or jerk shad. The two types of top water baits I use are poppers and ‘walk the dog’ type lures. Poppers are simply lures with a concave mouth that you cast out and give a few pops. ‘Walk the dog’ lures float on top of the water and you work back and forth by giving your rod tip several quick jerks. It does take some practice before this technique is mastered, but is deadly particularly early in the morning or just after a rain storm. Now, pin fish can be caught using a cast net and either fished on the bottom or drifted below a cork. This is the best way to catch big gator trout. The scented baits are great to fish with, and those can also be fished behind a cork. If the water I’m fishing is generally more than four feet or so I generally like to just hook them to a jig head and tight line them on the bottom.
Red fish are easy to identify because they are red. They have huge scales on them that remind you of coke bottles. Blackened red fish are excellent table fair. These fish are fighters, and some can pull like a small shark. Just like trout they love shrimp fished behind popping corks and will also take scented baits. Target these fish along the many creek mouths that flow out into the Gulf. Concentrate on fishing points and deeper holes. Red fish also love gold spoons, spinner baits with jerk shad, and jerk shad by themselves. Another red fish favorite is pieces of cut mullet.

Trout and red fish are awesome table fare and can be caught wading, from a boat, and a kayak. For more information on the Florida flats check out gulfcoastfishing.webs.com.

Camping on Florida’s Santa Fe River

The Santa Fe River is a tributary that flows into the Suannee. The Santa Fe is home to numerous springs, and the river itself can get gin clear when the water is low. The river is pretty, but packed with people particularly on summer weekends. A few buddies and me decided to spend a few nights camping on the river, not a one of us knew a thing about it.

We put out near Ellie Ray’s, south of Live Oak, campground and went upriver. The water was black stained and up from recent rains. Local’s told us the fish wouldn’t bite with the water low and clear, so this was good for us. My buddy Ryan and I were in his ghenoue, and we caught a ton of redbellies and a few warmouth’s mostly on meal worms and crickets. I did catch a small largemouth, but none of the Suannee bass that I had heard inhabit the river. The fish were small, but pulled bigger. The river has a strong current and the fish get strong from battling it. Mostly we just fished along the pretty cypress lined banks, and in the eddies. We got a lot more bites out of the current.

Finding a camping spot proved much harder than any of us had expected. We probably ran four hours upriver the first day before we found something suitable. There seemed to be a house around every bend, and due to the water level being up we could find no sandbars. Finally we found a small bluff that looked like would work, and there were no houses on this little stretch of river. We fried fish both nights, and they were extremely good being so fresh.

The second day we went upriver past Hwy 47 bridge, and found a great rope swing that we had fun on for a while, and then continued going up. This is when we ran into literally thousands of people floating down the river on tubes. We had to turn around then and fished our way back to where we had pitched our tents.

All in all we had a decent time on the river, but it was more the place you take your girlfriend, not a place for you and the boys to get away from everything. The fish bit well and pulled good, but were not massive by any means. The river was pretty though.

Now came the next important step in the process, finding the right man for the job.

It was another several weeks after sifting through a handful of recommendations that I came across a tip from an outdoor message board about a gunsmith whose shop was within a two hour’s drive from me. Instantly, I found Bobby Pitchford’s website and called to set up an appointment so I could come by to talk shop.

After meeting Bobby, I knew he was the man I wanted to build my rifle. We discussed what I wanted from this gun, calibers, and all the little details that would match it to my needs as a quad hunter: a mercury tube recoil reducer, kick-eeze recoil pad, moving the magazine release switch so my shooting orthotic wouldn’t hit it after the shot, the barrel type & length, the stock, pros & cons of fluting, and if I’d need to add a muzzle break or not.

A couple weeks later, I bought a used Remington 7mm mag from a site called AuctionArms.com for $340 so we could use its “action” for my new rifle and had it shipped directly to Pitchford Gunworks. A month later, my long-action stock from Bell & Carlson finished in mossy oak new breakup was also on the way. Now all we needed was to wait on the new barrel and Bobby said he’d call so I could come in and watch him start the build. (Below – the old remington action and new barrel & stock laid out before work starts.)

I arrived in Waller, Tx., early on (date) to watch Bobby get to work on my new gun. And it didn’t take long to see that Bobby is a master craftsman. He broke down the used rifle from auctionarms.com so he could salvage the action. These are the first few steps: separate the action from the old barrel and inspect the action and bolt to check for wear or any defects. Luckily, mine had not been shot that much and was in terrific condition according to Bobby. He disassembled the bolt and checked the working parts. Then he lapped the lug on the end of the bolt to smooth them down to a precise fit when the bolt is closed. The square lug between the action & the barrel was next to be removed and inspected. Its width is measured for precision down to a thousandth of an inch, which is about equal to the thickness of a sheet of paper. ‘Heck, everything seems to be judged to the thousandth in this shop.’ After a few quick measurements, Bobby says with a slightly frustrated sigh “It’s not bad… Let’s just get a competition grade lug and be done with it.” (Below – the old factory lug compared to the competition-grade lug guaranteed to pass certain measurement requirements.)

Next came the threading and chambering of the 26” match grade Lothar-Walther barrel with a 1400 contour and #9 twist. (We decided on 26 inches for barrel length because on magnum rifles you get better velocity with longer barrels. This allows all the powder to burn before the bullet clears the muzzle.) Bobby threads and chambers the barrel on a lathe that he custom-altered to better suit barrel work, for all types of barrels. (According to Bobby, he’s an inventor not bound by traditional gunsmithing ways. He said he’s always looking for what works best when building guns. Above – here is my barrel in the machine that rotates the barrel instead of the threading & reaming tools. It has already been threaded and Bobby is preparing the 7mm reamer for chambering.) Throughout the process, a coolant is pumped through the muzzle end of the barrel to ensure that every bit of filing debris is washed out the back and never touches the inside of the barrel.

Of course, everything is fit to the precision and feel of Bobby’s hands for exact specification that he holds in his mind from 20 years of gun making. The last bit of chambering he completes by hand. (Below – the 7mm reamer grinds out a new chamber as an oily fluid is pumped into the muzzle end of the barrel. The reamer is stationary and inserted into the spinning barrel.)

Then came the fluting process. We agreed on 6 flutes to allow maximum cooling of the barrel. Bobby started the 45000ths inch flutes 2.5” from the muzzle and ran them 17” back once my barrel was secured in the fluting machine. In all of 15 minutes, he was done.

Since we figured I probably didn’t need a muzzle break, and because I didn’t like the idea of all the noise it added to the shot, we nixed the option.

The only thing left to do was a “trigger job” where the existing trigger is enhanced by having all the sear surfaces honed by hand to a mirror finish. The spring is replaced with a Wolf spring and the sear engagement screw set for precise trigger pull.

After Bobby installed the recoil reducer into my stock, my rifle was ready for assembly, which was fine with me because I was itching to get it to the range. When we topped it off with a Leupold VX-3 4.5-14X40 with 30MM tube using Warne scope rings, it was ready to roll.

These are never more apparent in Texas than when the temps start sniffin’ the 100 degree mark. When it’s too hot to fish, hunting seems a million miles away. Seems like forever too since I heard my last turkey gobble, and our annual trip to Las Vegas every June only serves to keep my mind off of that fact for a brief while. When I get back, there’ll be two long months before I can dust off the shotguns again staring me in the face. That’s one reason I’ve been trying to work out how to get a summer home in Montana (or somewhere) to keep from going all-the-way crazy. I’ll let ya know when I get it figured out. (Maybe I should get myself a lotto ticket!)

Thank goodness I drew a couple of deer tags this spring, one for whitetail in Kansas and the other for mule deer in New Mexico, to keep me busy while working out the trip details. After whiffing on everything I put in for last year, I was on the edge of busting if I didn’t get to go out-of-state again this year. I even put in a bid through one of my disabled hunter clubs on a 5-day bowhunt for the monster bucks that walk in Buffalo County, Wisconsin, just to make sure. Little did I know that the area produces twice as many B&C and P&Y bucks every year than the famed Pike County, Illinois. I won’t find out about that one though until August though, but it’s another something to look forward to, and for me, that means the world.

That brings me right back to the original problem, surviving the summer. I’ve done all I can with my trips and lining up all the inquiries I’ve received from disabled hunters across the country with the people who can help them get back into the outdoors. The bird dogs are listless, the doves are in the midst of breeding & the rice crops are still months from harvest. (Haven’t my numbers hit yet?)

To make matters worse, I just got through reading the Old Man and the Boy by Robert Ruark. It’s a great story about how I think every boy in this country ought to have the privilege of growing up, and I’d recommend it to all outdoorsmen, but it sure makes a man lonesome for going afield or fishing.

Lucky for me, I guess, that I took up writing, and had the bright idea to start an E-zine about disabled hunters. This feels like the perfect time to get busy on it. (There’s sure not much else to do.) With all the friends I’ve made across the country, it became clear that this was the next logical step for me. I’ve heard a lot of terrific stories that I believe everyone ought to know about. I only hope y’all will be as interested in reading it as I am writing it. (Are you sure my numbers didn’t hit yet!)

On a more serious subject, I recently was asked to attend a ‘functional group’ at a place called TIRR which is a rehab hospital in Houston. It’s one of the leading spinal cord rehabs in the country, and the summertime is their busy time. It’s where I found myself almost 25 years ago. Well, periodically, when they get enough guys in there that are into hunting & fishing, they give me a call to come in and show ‘em some of my adaptive ’stuff’.

And let me assure you, there’s no way anyone could come out of that place without a new appreciation for the life they have and everything they can do. If there’s anything I wish I could share with everyone reading this blog, it’s that. Didn’t take long for me to realize I was just marking time in between trips instead of enjoying every minute of every day like I should be doing. Now go have a good summer.

The thing about Goa is that it wants to make a man put his roots down. Even an essentially rootless person like myself. It is laid back (almost horizontal at times) and compared to the rest of this money mad country, a haven for the senses. Yep I could almost feel myself putting my roots down. But that is another story. Read the rest of this entry »