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Tampa Bay - South Shore
Capt. Fred Everson
May 2, 2003
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report
Shell Point Bait and Tackle Fishing Report
April turned out to be a funny month, leaving many professional fishermen shaking their heads in wonder. After a pretty good snook bite in March, a series of cold fronts in April slowed snook catching to a crawl.
Despite that, there were some bright spots for anglers on the Southshore of Tampa Bay.
The best news this year has been that the bait is back. We’ve had pilchards well up into the bay since early February, and they have been the nice big baits that snook fishermen like.
Spanish mackerel continue to forage up and down the bay, and some of these fish are running over 30 inches, and grouper fishermen are reporting good catches inside the bay, bottom fishing with live bait.
Redfish seem to have been scattered by the heavy weather of last weekend. I’m not finding the big pods of fish that I did two and three weeks ago, but the fish that we’ve been catching are those tournament-sized reds – just under the 27-inch maximum. They’ve been hitting spoons and live bait equally well.
Danny Guarino and I did a snook soiree on a local flat the last day of snook season. We each limited ourselves to using only a single lure. Danny chose a weedless gold spoon, while I fished a six-inch RipTide jerkbait in pearl (no surprise there). The gold spoon produced three redfish for Danny, while the jerkbait caught only one fish, but it was a 27-inch snook. The weather couldn’t have been better. When we left the dock it was windy and threatening with thunderclouds on the horizon. But by the time we got to where we were going, it calmed down and cleared off to make for the nicest time on the water I’ve had all year. We caught four fish in a couple of hours and were back to the dock well before dark.
With snook season closed now until September first, and with Easter behind us, traffic on the bay should lighten up a bit. May is still a prime month to catch snook, and since the April bite never really got going, the catch and release action could be a best bet in coming weeks.
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