When the Moonlight Bites Back

Salt crusted my lips as the bay's black water swallowed the last sliver of sun. My cooler of 活虾饵 pulsed with nervous energy, their translucent bodies glowing like liquid mercury in the dock lights. 'Tide turns at 9:07,' I muttered, checking my watch for the twelfth time. The math should work - outgoing current would funnel redfish through the oyster beds.

First cast sailed over the moonlit flats. The popping cork's splash echoed too loud in the mangrove tunnel. Nothing. By the third hour, my shoulders remembered last week's hauling job at the cannery. A blue crab scuttled across my submerged boot, pincers snapping at nothing.

Then the water breathed.

My 纺车轮 sang as thirty yards of braid ripped seaward. Rod tip danced like a palm in hurricane wind. 'Not another damn ray,' I growled, but the headshakes came wrong - sharp vertical jerks. When the copper flank broke surface, moonlight glinted off scales bigger than my spread fingers.

Back at the truck, rinsing fish slime off with warm bottled water, I finally understood Dad's old warning: 'Night fishing steals pieces of your soul.' My stolen fragment still wriggles in that redfish's belly, waiting for the next tide change.