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Everglades National Park - Flamingo
Capt. Bob LeMay
April 14, 2007
Flamingo - Saltwater Fishing Report
This is my first report this month. A day off now is a rare event and I've been back inside Flamingo or along the Gulf coast almost every day. The weather is finally beginning to moderate, water temps are above 72 degrees each morning, and fish are getting hungrier by the day.
That hasn't meant things have been predictable or as expected, more about that later.
Most days, we've managed at least one, sometimes two, backcountry slams on lures or flies. Speckled trout are very abundant now with fish as big as 24" at times. Redfish and snook have been fairly easy to find and hungry. As usual the smaller fish are a lot easier to fool than the big ones, particularly in shallow sight-fishing conditions. All of our fish have come on lures or flies with light spin or 8wt fly rods. We're even finding fish that attack topwater lures now, even snook that jumped popping bugs or small deer hair mullet patterns. We caught and released one snook, about 5lbs, in a foot of water that we could see working back under a mangrove shoreline too shallow to reach... When the fish turned off of the shoreline back out to us my angler, John Kern from Colorado, presented a surface slider on fly perfectly and watched the fish pounce on it. As I released the fish you could see that it was just full of small crabs, the size of a nickel.... Inside one of the many Gulf coast rivers a day or two later we found one tiny creek mouth that was just packed with snook, reds, and trout. Although the spot showed no signs of activity, you couldn't cast a lure, surface fly, or anything into that area without one or more bites... None of the fish were slot sized, except for the trout, but I quit counting when we'd released more than 60 snook - many on the same little mullet fly right at the surface.
Although we mostly fished artificials these past few weeks, on a few occasions it was time to catch a few ladyfish and do a little live baiting... The surprise, these past two weeks, has been the lack of big tarpon in all the river and coastline areas where I normally find them (until yesterday...). Instead most live baits were eaten by very hungry sharks, usually lemons or bulls. We did have one bait that a 16lb cobia liked along a shoreline. He was carefully photoed, then released...
The big tarpon finally showed up yesterday when we found a concentration in a quiet, interior, river. These were fish from 60 to 150lbs in a river less than 100 feet wide... Tarpon heaven, at last. We struck five fish on bait and lures yesterday, leadering one that was over 100lbs on bait, then jumping off or breaking off (big tarpon are tough in small rivers...) the remainder. At one point we were poling down the shoreline and casting to fish laid up under the mangroves, just like snook... Steve Dreyfus, from Baltimore, who was on the rod with the big fish, had never caught one before. All he could say was that he couldn't believe a fish that big would be in such an area... I think he'll be back.
This year fishing patterns that I'm used to just didn't seem to apply in a lot of situations..... Now that it's warmed up a bit, things are getting back on track. Still no mosquitoes, fish are biting, it's just great in the backcountry now.
Tight Lines
Bob LeMay
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