Despite the heat, it was a fun and productive, but pretty bizarre week of surf fishing in Melbourne Beach — from a mysteriously dead nesting turtle to seasonal oddities and the “fever” of spotted eagle rays cruising the coast. The barrage of giant-sized sand fleas that hit our beaches in abundance over weeks prior has sharply declined. Fleas have still been findable, but their numbers and sizes have certainly diminished.

Meanwhile, conditions have generally been pretty good — other than most of the day being scorching hot. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the water clarity has left something to be desired with incoming tide, which, for me, did seem to dampen productivity during morning sessions throughout the week. The best periods of fishing I’ve experienced under these conditions have been the two hours or so preceding sunset.

Despite some inconsistencies, it was a pretty good week of surf fishing in Melbourne Beach. We brought home just one keeper pompano but a good number of whiting. Most of the whiting were pretty average, but we closed out the weekend with a fish just over 16” in length. Speaking of the weekend, the black drum were just absolutely dominant in our stretch of beach over that time frame. Or maybe it was just one REALLY dumb and hungry fish — because we caught at least a dozen black drum that were close to identical in size, just over 13″ — a bit shy of the 14” keeper threshold. Another thing that stuck out was the totally random mid-summer bluefish caught on a pompano rig baited with sand flea.

The coolest moment this week came last Tuesday when I was scouting the surf with my drone. Buzzing around, I stumbled into a large group of absolutely stunning spotted eagle rays that hugged the shoreline as they cruised up and down the beach. There were more smaller groups of them spattered out all around the beach. Check out some of the footage I posted on the Spacefish FB page. It’s hard to tell exactly but I believe the wingspan on some of these larger rays spanned +6ft. Pretty cool!

In another unusual but unfortunate experience, the body of a recently deceased momma sea turtle was stranded in the dunes. It appeared to have died while in the process of nesting and laying eggs. Wildlife officials could not determine a cause of death from the scene. Sad, but one wonders what could have actually caused the death? There’s been many bobcat sightings here in South Brevard beaches, but you would think such an attack would be easily determined upon expert analysis.