I don’t mean for good, I mean just long enough for me to get in some relaxing fishing. I haven’t gone back and researched the climatological data, but March seems regularly to be windy time on Florida’s east coast. How windy? Well, right now the anemometer on my sailboat’s mast is showing fairly steady winds of close to 20 knots with a few gusts to the higher 20s, and I haven’t been watching it that closely, so we may have had a few blasts of 30 knots or more. Hardly dangerous, but also not very conducive to running around the Indian River in a flats boat with very low gunwales.

Winds like these are particularly frustrating because March usually marks a pickup in fishing, especially out on the flats. The water temperature is rising and the advent of daylight savings time means extra time to chase fish in the evening after work. I’m eager to get out there, but then along comes the wind and dampens my enthusiasm.

It isn’t that you can’t catch fish when it’s windy. The fish don’t seem to care (what do they know? They’re protected from the wind). The problem is that it’s uncomfortable to fish.  The Indian River is pretty wide where I live so even in an east or west wind you get some pretty decent chop, especially when the waves are breaking against the slab sides of a flats boat and sending spray all over the crew. Of course you can always find shelter up against the shore, but that doesn’t make much sense when low tide keeps both you and the fish away from the shoreline.

Worst are north or south winds. The Indian River runs north and south so any wind from either of those directions has plenty of fetch over which to raise a heavy-duty chop. Banging into that chop at 30 knots or more can cause you to crack a tooth or at least wish for a little more padding in the seat. And because the spoil islands that lie just outside the main Intracoastal Waterway Channel tend to run from north to south, too, there’s previous little shelter to be had at the lee end of the islands when the wind is north or south. Wander a hundred yards east or west and you’re right back in the chop.

I tried a few days ago to snag a grouper along the edge of the waterway where the Corps of Engineers many years ago had to dynamite some limestone rock to carve out the channel. Maneuvering your bait into the zone where a grouper lurking in the rubble will see it requires some pretty precise positioning. Too far one way and your bait is dragging along the flat bottom of the channel. Too far the other way and it’s in five feet of water filled with weeds.

The wind was blowing strongly out of the south, but the ebbing tide was flowing south setting up a classic rough-water scenario: wind against tide. First I thought I would drift north into the current with the wind behind be. I soon realized, though, that I was going too fast. But when I turned around and tried to use the trolling motor to go south into the wind, I made very little headway. After a couple of hours of that with one undersized grouper to show for my efforts, I came home. The wind hasn’t stopped since and I haven’t been fishing since, either.