Fishing time with Seine Net - Capt. Paul Braly

On Saturday morning I had the pleasure of fishing with Paul Braly Sr., aka "Seine Net" (because that's what it feels like your fishing behind if he gets in front of you). Dad is a second generation fisherman with his father (my late grandad) being a great surf fisherman.

My dad grew up fishing bait in the guts of the gulf beach and not ever really being a plugger aside from some speck rigs now and then back in the "cooler full and your done" days. These days he doesn't know what bait is and he can clean an area quick so I don't let him get too far out in front of me while wading the same shoreline.

We navigated safely to our fish hold this Saturday, even though it was really foggy. Fishing with Pink Hologram Devil Eyes with TruLock 1/16 oz jigs, we started wading down the shoreline until we came upon some nice sized trout; they looked to be around 18"-20". Dad, standing next to me, snagged into a lunker trout. It sucked down that lure, after bumping it three different times and next thing you know we were photographing a 7 pounder before putting him back in the water.

We hit a few more 2 pounders as we were casting our way back up the shore, before the action stopped as an airboat came along and hopped into a lake ahead of us. We headed back to the boat and decided to move on, since that was a pretty good sign that action was over. At our next spot, half the fog lifted since it was about 8:15, so we didn't have to keep looking for other boats coming up on us.

This time I was the one to get the first strike and I thought I had outdone Dad's fish for a bit, but discovered I had hooked into a redfish. That was the beginning of a fishing frenzy that netted us 11 more redfish between us with just 20 casts. The redfish wore us out and we hadn?t even waded more than 50 yards.

In all, we kept 6 redfish and five trout releasing the 7 pounder. Under normal circumstances we don't keep many fish, but my brother is coming in from the Irving area and asked for some Christmas Fish so we obliged.

The amazing thing is (and I'm not just saying this) we only used one lure each all morning. Try catching 5-6 redfish back to back per person on any other soft plastic and see how many you go thru. We got home around 9:30am just in time for some honey do's so I guess next time I'll keep Sr. on the water longer.