From Ron Brooks,
Your Guide to Saltwater Fishing.
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Ah, spring! This is the time that flowers bloom, animals are amorous and most important to me, the flood tides occur. Spring flood tides are an annual occurrence caused by the relative positioning of the sun and moon in the spring, and the effect that this positioning has on tidal movement. High tides can be as much as four to five feet above normal. Add a good wind in the right direction and they can be even higher.

Flood tides mean experiencing some fishing methods that are only available once or twice a year. Areas that previously were inaccessible by fishermen are suddenly, albeit temporarily fishable.

So it was on this particular spring morning as John and I left the ramp. The water was so high I had to back my truck all the way past the axle to launch my flats skiff. We were in the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) headed for a particular oyster bar creek that had been good to us in the past. We were running wide open doing about 50 knots in the early gray of first light.

I should have seen how big the wake was that the oncoming 42 foot sportfisher was making, but I didn’t. We hit his wake and went airborne, jumping probably six feet in the air and taching about 7,000 rpm before I could throttle back! I looked over at John while we were mid-air and he was flailing away trying to grab anything he could to stay attached to the boat!

Wham! We hit the water and kept running.

Bang! John hit the floor of the boat and glared up at me!

“It wasn’t my fault!” I screamed as he checked for broken parts.  “That captain has to slow for oncoming traffic! He’s responsible for his wake!” I said.

John just glared and said, “Oh yeah? And just who is responsible for you?”

Onward to the creek. We were trying to catch the high flood tide back in that creek so we could fish a huge flat that is normally crawling with redfish.

I made the turn into the creek and immediately came to a grinding halt. I mean it was literally a grinding halt! The floodtide had changed the look of the creek so much that I misjudged the entrance and ground my way onto the oyster bar just inside the mouth. And John? Well, John was looking the other way when we hit the bar, and when we stopped, he had rolled all the way to the front casting deck. Boy, can he glare!

As I trimmed the motor up to move off the oyster bar, John got himself back in order. An oyster bar can play havoc on a prop, and this one did just that. I had all three blades, but they now had some new twists and buckles that put an interesting vibration though the whole boat.

You can’t run on an unbalanced prop without doing expensive damage to the lower unit shaft and bearings, so I idled up to shallower water, shut down, and tilted the engine all the way up. John just quietly continued to glare at me.

I grabbed some fronds of the sawgrass and held on against the current to keep the boat still. I reached under the console, retrieved my spare prop, and sheepishly held it out in John’s direction. BOY, can he glare!

But John is a good sport, and he eased his way over the side of the boat to wade back to the engine. A prop change is relatively easy, but you have to be in the water to do it. As he stood at the back of the boat and began removing the cotter key and prop nut, I noticed that he was getting shorter. The longer he worked, the shorter he got! I knew it couldn’t be the tide getting higher, because by now it had started moving out. 

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