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Rennie and I weighed two 22" redfish in for the Charleston Lowcountry Redfish Cup. 8 lbs got us 6th place out of 51 teams. The weather was absolutely horrible. It rained all day. We checked out and headed to our first spot. I started fi...shing as soon as we got there. My first fish of the day was a beautiful 24" red which obviously wasn't going to do much for us so we threw him back and I cast again. The next fish I caught was a bit of a heart breaker. He was right on the 23" line. We weren't sure if he'd measure so we had a very difficult choice to make, keep or throw back? We kept him for the time being. We continued fishing our first spot for about an hour and a half. We caught about 15 fish in that first hour and a half. They were really loving my bait, the Category 5 Manic Minnow. Rennie got in on the action about 4 fish after me. We caught about 30 fish total and had several 21.5-22" fish that we had to cull to choose which was the best. Unfortunately our culling beam was broken so we weren't very confident that we were always keeping the heaviest fish. One of the 22's we kept was over 4 lbs and the second was under 4lbs. Had our culling beam been working that probably wouldn't have been the case. The fishing was incredible for such terrible conditions. The decision to keep or throw back the 23"was on our minds all day. 15 minutes before weigh in we went back to our first spot and caught another 22" that we decided to keep instead of the 23". Throwing him back was the worst decision of our day. Although we made a bad decision at the end we still had fun. I was completely drenched while Rennie stayed dry. I learned the hard way that my rain gear that was supposed to be waterproof was not. It was still a good day of catching not just fishing. The fish really surprised me by eating at every spot we went. We had to change up our tactics several times. Sometimes weighted weedless hooks and other times weightless hooks.
