2/26/11 Steve and I fished in the 1st ‘Salty Fly’ Tournament out of Tampa this past weekend. While we didn’t do so well overall, we had some chances, and had a lot of fun. They did a great job of organizing for the first tournament, and had solid industry sponsor support. 6 am Captains meeting in Apollo Beach where everyone picked their numbers and received the ‘id chips’ for the photos that day. It was a photo release tourney, so all fish had to have this chip visible in the picture. When the meeting was over, everyone quickly disbursed, almost to the point of running to the trucks. If one team would have started running, the rest of us probably would have done the same. 
Once the boat was in, we flew a little south to where we had scouted in January. The trout came quick and by accident actually. I had thrown a blind cast to a pothole, and let the fly drift as I stretched my line. While this was going on my fly line came tight and we landed a decent 17 3/4″ trout. This happened in the first half hour of the a.m, so we were feeling good about getting that out of the way. We had the rest of the day to focus on reds. Right away, a nice fish tailed, and we poled in range. I still had the ‘trout’ setup in my hand and threw a fly that spooked the fish. We had another shot or two, but never connected. The rest of the day went quiet. The wind picked up a little, lots of people showed up on the flats, and the fish in our area just didn’t cooperate. But we had a great time, met some cool people, had tasty grinds at ‘The Fish House’ and a couple BBQ stops . In the raffle, Steve won the Precision Yak Pak, and I got lucky and won the G.Loomis Crosscurent 8wt Fly Rod. So we went home pretty happy. 
We stayed at The Inn at Little Harbor, which had given a discounted rate for the Tourney.
