Now it’s Day 3 of pier fishing down in Panama City Beach, my last day to fish. It’s only going to be a half day before I start on my way back home. I started the morning pretty slow. I chose to sleep in some to be well-rested for my drive back home, instead of waking up before the sun. Instead, I loaded up all my stuff in the truck, grabbed complimentary coffee from the hotel lobby, and took a short walk on the beach while enjoying my coffee. While fishing is great, try to just take the water in sometimes. It’s good for you. Though looking at the surf conditions, there were probably some flounders in the first trough. After my coffee & walk, I checked out of the hotel and headed over to the pier to fish.
Fishing Coverage on AllOutdoor
After the bust of a morning the day before, the parking lot was a lot emptier this morning. I got up to the pier house to pay and asked the guy there if I had missed anything interesting this morning. And of course, he tells me, yeah there a was solid run of big axe handle Spanish mackerel right at sunrise. Of course, but whatever I had plenty of Spanish mackerel in the cooler already, no need to be greedy. After that, I start my walk out and notice right away the conditions had changed overnight. The wind was still blowing from the East but it is a lot weaker now, and the water has gotten dirtier. Both of these changes are not looking ideal for a good day of fishing.
And I was right, the end of the pier sucked. After that run of big Spanish mackerel in the morning, it was pretty dead. I did run into my friend Ernie though, and we at least had a good chat while we fished out there. While the predators were nowhere to be found out there, the bait and birds were thick. I immediately lost a knife jig to a pelican dive-bombing splash of the jig and getting the line wrapped on a wing. I was fishing lighter tackle and he popped me off immediately, but at least the jig fell off after he broke me off. I decided to take advantage of the abundant live bait and caught some cigar minnows and goggle eyes. I started throwing them on ice for my friend Ivan to bag up and take home. He freezes them when they are plentiful so he always has bait year round. After getting a half dozen baits, another pelican flew out from under the pier and broke off half the sabiki rig. At this point I was done fishing the end, the birds were driving me up a wall. Ernie was also done with the lack of fish at the end so we decided to head down towards the middle T.
Here we saw some action with a ton of bait hiding in the shadow of the pier. Every once in a while Spanish mackerel would come through real quick slashing at the bait. Making it look like it was raining bait as the little cigar minnows would jump. First I tried throwing my Spanish mackerel rig from the night before with the jerkbait behind an egg sinker, but that didn’t get a strike. We spent the next hour or two trying to tease these Spanish to bite. I switched to live bait starting with a 20lb wire leader with a live cigar, then switched to a 60lb fluorocarbon leader, and finally 40lb fluorocarbon with a long O’Shaughnessy hook to go as finesse as possible and still have a chance to land the Spanish. This finally got me a strike right next to the pier, but it only ate the tail of my cigar minnow. I gave up on those big Spanish and switched back to artificials to blind cast, this time throwing a small spoon behind the egg sinker.
After a couple of casts, I finally had a bite, it wasn’t a big Spanish but at least it was a fish. I threw again at the same spot again hoping to run into some more Spanish mackerel but ended up with only a couple of ladyfish that I threw back. Then after throwing back that second ladyfish on my next cast, the birds struck again. I had a pelican fly into my wind loop. He managed to get the spoon in his wing and had me pinned to the rail for a bit as I waited for Ernie to get a net to bring the pelican up.
We got the bastard over the rail and popped the hook out of him. He took a couple of steps snapped at another guy fishing and then flew off strong. After dealing with my third bird for the day I felt like it was time to start packing it up. I packed up most of the bigger rods and just kept fishing the sabiki rig to keep catching goggle eyes. I think I ended up with a couple dozen which I shared with Ernie and Ivan to take home. While I messing with the goggle eyes, Ernie got a nice slot redfish to eat a small hardtail(blue runner) right on the first sandbar. While it wasn’t as fish-filled as the prior two days of pier fishing, my last day down wasn’t terrible, besides the birds. I did miss the big runs of mackerel for the trip, but that’s fishing. And like I said in the beginning 30 minutes might be all it takes for you to miss out on a limit of fish. I’ll hopefully be back down in the spring and go fish the bay with Ernie after I pick up another custom rod from him.
