Tampa Bay Fishing Report

Capt. TJ Stewart
May 25, 2004
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report

Tarpon are back on the beach

While the weather was pretty nice this week the wind was not too bad and the fishing was great. Last week we got to do a little more fishing for Red fish and the bite was awesome. We caught over 25 Red fish almost every day with a lot of big fish. Most of the Red fish have ranged between 26-32 inches with a few bulls at 34 inches. These Red fish are a lot of fun when you get them into a feeding frenzy .You throw the line in the water count to 3 and if you don’t have a fish on the line you need to re throw the bait.

We managed to do a little Snook fishing . At the start of the week the bite was a little slow but then again after catching the Red fish any bite is slow, but toward the end of the week the bite got a lot better and we had a few days that we caught 15-20 Snook. At the start of the week we did manage to catch one trophy fish this was a 37 inch Snook weighed about 16 lbs .Man what a nice fish.!

We had one day of Trout fishing this week .We caught about 10 after some of the other fishing we did and four of those were over 20 inches long..

Then last but not least we have the Tarpon.. The great silver kings have finally started to show up out in the bay and on the beaches. The fishing in the bay has been pretty good early in the morning. We have a few rock piles in the bay that these fish like to hang around first thing in the morning so we usually anchor into position before the sun comes up not only do we usually have a awesome Tarpon bite but we get to watch the beautiful sun rise. Then as the sun get higher these fish usually move out into the bay where you fish for them in deeper water, or we go out to the beach. The beach Tarpon fishing is really neat this is sight fishing for the Tarpon. This is when you look for the fish in big schools swimming in circles in big numbers. If you can only imagine 20-30 or more big Tarpon most of the fish being over 80 lbs in a huge school just swimming on top of the water just waiting for your bait to be placed just right so one of the great Silver Kings will eat and then the fight is on!

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