Tampa Bay Fishing Report

Capt. TJ Stewart
January 17, 2006
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report

Just a little cold!

Well let’s see the wind is still blowing and it definitely cooled down. But we have still have been able to get out there and do some fishing. Over the past two weeks the water temp has gone up and down 6 degrees. This will cause the fish to move around from place to place.

Will let’s start with the offshore fishing. We did manage to get out there one day but for the most part it has been too rough. Well the one day that we did manage to get off shore it was very nice we got out about 20 miles. But when we got out there the bottom machine would not work. Of course it had to break at the first spot. I had the numbers in the gps but with no bottom machine it is a little rough to find the spot. The gps gets you pretty close but not right on the spot so to say no more we had a tough time. We did manage to catch a number of Snapper and most of these fish were a good size. But because we could not get right on the spot we had a tough time catching the bigger Grouper. We did have a mess of Snapper to go home.

As far as the back water fishing goes most of all the fishing we have been doing is Sheepshead fishing. This has been the most active bit as far as the back water fishing goes. We have been catching a lot of nice Sheepshead over the past couple of weeks I can say this year I have caught some of the biggest I have ever seen. Some of the fish have been over 5 lbs closer to 6 lbs. If you are looking to catch a Red fish we can do this but this time of year we are doing this on artificial. Most of the time using jigs working them slow over some of the flats where the Red fish are.

But it is changing from week to week a few weeks ago we could not keep the Red fish off the bait. But to say no more I am ready for it to warm back up! I guess we have another few weeks before that will happen.

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