Report for Destin, Florida - Nearshore

Capt. Larry Pentel
August 5, 2001
Destin - Saltwater Fishing Report

Right about now I'm supposed to be waiting for a swivel to pop up out the water so I can dive for the leader and wire up a 200# tarpon my clients been fighting for the past 3 hours. Instead I'm sitting at home keeping an eye on the TV and watching for what ( soon to be Hurricane) Barry is doing. At the present time all predictions show landfall as a minimum hurricane (80 mile an hour winds ) sometime tonight with the eye going right over the yard. We've got everything battened down and picked up after leaving Indian Pass first thing this AM and coming back to Destin. We'll just sit tight and see what it does to the fishing.

As a general rule hurricanes of this size actually help the bottom fishing by moving fish around and pushing a lot of fish up into inshore waters. If a storm comes from the East it will sometimes put groupers on all the inshore spots and even under the bay bridges and jettties. After one storm in the '80's there were literally hundreds of black grouper caught by shore based anglers off the east jetty. A storm coming in from the West is apt to bring us lots of Red Snappers. I've seen it right after a storm ( for over a month) where it was hard to troll for kings 'cause you kept catching snappers on top of all the good king rocks. The bad part ( on the fishing end) is if all the bait (pogies) get moved around and scattered the tarpon fishing will be slow for a week or so til the bait bunches back up. We'll be " exploring by Wed. to see whats up.

The fishing this past week has mainly been for kings. The weather has not been the usuall hot and dead calm of August. It has been a little bouncy and breezy but the Kings seem to have loved it with limit catches being easy on a 4 hour trip. Friday had it to rough to run the Gulf at all so my folks decided to make it a half day bay trip instead. With the wind blowing a steady 20 to 25 it was almost too much even for the bay. We found a lee shore and managed to perceveir and caught 9 specks. One of my junior anglers (there were 3) also had a sea monster ! A big old needle nose gar about 4 ft. long decided to eat his minnow and tussle with him. I think he was more excited than if he'd have got a 7# trout.

Batten down the hatches. We'll ride out yet another one and see what blows in this time.

Capt. Larry Pentel

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