Crystal River Fishing Reports

Anyone who knows me knows before every charter i have a mental game plan of what i want to do throughout the day. I knew going into this trip it was going to be a day of grinding it out due to our conditions. Day of the full moon, cold front coming through the night before dropping temperatures 25 degrees, strong northwest wind with gusts 25mph+, we had practically every odd against us. The morning of the charter i got to the ramp an hour before the scheduled pickup time like i always do to make sure everything is setup and ready to go. When initially getting to the ramp i automatically noticed how LOWWWW the water was compared to the previous two days that i had scouted just two days prior when tide charts were predicting similar low tides but this was easily a -1.0 tide if not lower. I spent that entire hour at the ramp trying to come up with a new game plan. We started the morning off hitting some deeper holes and pockets trying to find some trout. After about 2-3 hours of fishing deeper pockets and holes we had around a dozen trout with some lady fish and some small mangrove snapper mixed in, which is super slow in my personal opinion. During those 2-3 hours of fishing for trout i was just praying some more water would come in because anyone who knows me, knows pot hole trout fishing is my biggest pet peeve and i try to avoid doing it at all. I knew once the tide came in we would be able to push in the back country a little bit and find some schools of reds but it just seemed like there wasn’t enough water yet. Norbert and Jon told me that they were really hoping to find some redfish on this specific day and i decided that i was going to give it my best effort to get us into the back country where i knew some redfish were going to be laid up with some big schools of mullet trying to soak up some sun. Ended up full sending the boat across a flat that had grass sticking out of the water and timed it perfectly coming off plane to glide into the last deeper hole barely the length of my boat before there was no more coming off plane anywhere. Tried to trolling motor us out of the hole and there was no moving anywhere and at that moment i decided it was time to hop in the 59 degree water temp (this was early February) and drag this 23ft bay boat where i wanted to go because there was no going back across the flat i just somehow made it across. Ended up dragging the boat for about 150 yards through thigh deep mud until we came across our first big school of mullet. I was pushing the boat as quietly as i possibly could and got about 40 yards away from the first big school of mullet and dropped the power poles down. When we first pulled up we were seeing some redfish tailing on the outside of the big school of mullet. It didn’t take long to get our first hookup on a healthy 25” redfish. After that it was fish after fish on every bait that floated past the school of mullet for a good 30 mins until it just completely turned off. We ended up catching 10 or so redfish off the first school of mullet then decided to move on. We ended the day with 20 or so redfish in the last two hours of fishing, and Norbert and Jon both had the opportunity sight fish their very first redfish