This weekend I had the opportunity to be truly Itinerant.  I was scheduled on short notice to give a lecture in Perdido Key, Alabama (near Pensacola, Florida) for a Saturday meeting.  As luck would have it, that is also near one of the best Pompano stretches in America and I have been wanting a shot at these elusive fish for some time now.  Basically, Pompano are “baby Permit” and they are extremely difficult to see in the water which makes site casting challenging at best.  The world record Pompano is only about 7 pounds, so generally anything in the 2-3 pound range is a respectable catch.  I managed to hook up with Captain Basil Yelverton “Baz” for a half day fishing following the lecture.  The wind was from the north and the beaches were calm and clear.

Game on . . .

It took about 45 minutes for me to get accustomed to spotting the Pompano, but eventually you get honed in on their movement and patterns.  We had multiple opportunities and I made honest shots at both groupies and singles and had many honest rejections with one successful take, oh how sweat it was.  I am still amazed at how nervous these fish are.  Any movement or noise and they are gone in a flash.  What’s even more crazy is how picky they are with the flies.  It is gut wrenching to make perfect casts and repeatedly watch these guys come straight to the fly and then bug off only inches away. However, it is a great victory to finally have it come together and land one.  Unfortunately, this was a quickie one-day trip; but hopefully there will be more in the future.

Pompano, 2.5 pounds.  Fly = yellow/yellow clouser.  Rod = Sage Smallmouth, 290 grain line, 10 lb tippet.

Also, I would like to mention that the Sage Smallmouth rod turned out to be a wonderful setup for this type of fishing. I fully posit that it was magic for me.  You can easily throw 60 feet of line with a simple double hall and reach fish easily.  It loads deep in the butt and in my opinion is a great saltwater rod.  At only 7′11″ it cuts through the wind with ease.  It is a veritable work-horse for streamer fishing on rivers, bass fishing on ponds, smallmouth fishing on rivers with poppers/sliders, and now saltwater fishing.  For the money, it is a great buy!

Later in the day the winds and sun angle made it difficult to continue sight casting.  So we went out and hammered the bluefish (and some sharks – but they wouldn’t eat; darn).  I recently tied up a box of Todd’s Wiggle Minnow patterns, including the white shad shema.  This fly is probably one of my top 5 patterns this year and I wanted to see how it performed in the saltwater.  As expected, it was a killer pattern!  That fly is just dead-on perfect and it’s action is sick.  The bluefish literally fought each other to get a bite.  However, we did have to use a flexible wire tippet to prevent tippet abrasion (bluefish have teeth!).

And then it was done!  Not bad for an itinerant half day of fishing!