Hopedale red report in prep of next week's Polar Vortex.

Hey what's up you guys, it has been a long time since I wrote one of these. Anyone who hasn't read one of these, when I started my youtube channel I would post fishing reports here and link to the video. That went a long way to whatever little measure of success my channel has is due in large part to those reports.

I wanted to bring that back because as we all know, a big cold front is coming through and I feel pretty damn confident I have the redfish figured out.

This trip was last Wednesday when the winds finally died down a bit after that arctic blast. I had been exploring the idea that I call temperature gradients. These are areas of small, shallow flats or duck ponds that are connected by or drained by small windy bayous. I call it temperature gradient because these areas combine both deep pockets where the temperature stays stable and flats that can warm (or cool) really fast.

Thus, a gradient. If you have watched my videos lately, this is all I've targeted so far this winter, and I've had only one trip in the last two months where I haven't caught a two-man limit of reds.

And that's how this trip went too. I launched out of Hopedale around 11:30 am and went to a kayak spot first. There were hammer trout there but it was difficult to land them and it was also pretty slow. So after about 20 minutes of that, I left for spot number 2.

I entered from the main bayou where I fan-casted for about 5 minutes as I made my way into a smaller drainage bayou connected to a pretty big, but very shallow pond. As I trolled into the bayou, I moved pretty fast because I wanted to get to that temperature gradient area.

As soon as I got to the last bend of that bayou before the big flat, bam! A 19" red. I kept going until another, this one 18". Then another, then another, then another.

Ultimately this one little bayou gave me 8 redfish, almost all (if not all) over slot, all in less than an hour.

The only other thing to add is lures. Just use lures that are slow, not huge but not small, that can slowly fall to the bottom. I was using the HH Salt Minnow (I'm not sponsored by them) in smoke because that color and profile just do great in the muddy water. But, you may find clean water, and in that case that's another report.

As always with these, you can find the video here: https://youtu.be/ZsIMv1yFpfo

Thanks for reading y'all!