Tampa Bay Fishing Report

Capt. TJ Stewart
March 7, 2006
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report

Its starting!

Well here were go it has finally broke loose and the bait has started moving into the bay and the fish are moving to their spring time hang outs. The water temp is between 65-72 degrees and during the warmer times these fish have been going crazy. It is definitely warming up now and I am ready for it to do so.

I will start with the Sheepshead. We did manage to do some of this fishing on some of the colder mornings, or rough days where we could not catch bait. Bait has not shown up really good yet. We are finding some of our bait in the bay but most of it that we have caught has been off the beaches. This can be a far run but it is the only place that we have been able to find a good amount of bait. Of course for the Sheepshead we are still catching these fish on shrimp. We have caught some really nice fish over the past weeks some of these Sheepshead have been pushing 5-6 lbs very nice fish.

Then let’s talk about the Red fish bite. This has been pretty good, we have had some really good days with these fish. Some days we have had to work for them a little they are not quite biting like they should be yet. There are a lot of fish around although some times they can be hard to catch. We have had a few problems. One of the biggest problems is the water clarity. Another problem is that we have had a lot of Red fish tournaments over the past 3 weeks so the fish have been really spooked .probably because they have had a lot of lures thrown at them. Back to the fishing each day we have managed to catch a few Red fish some days more then others. We had a few days that we have managed to get these fish in to a good frenzy. We have caught some really nice fish pushing 30 inches.

Snook Snook and more Snook, if we have had any trouble catching Red fish we have made up for it in the Snook fishing. It is going off. I was just telling the guys the other day we had a little weather coming through and we found a big school of Red fish and could not get them to bite but there were some Snook mixed in with them and we had no trouble catching them. I was telling the guys this is usually the other way around we usually have no trouble catching the Red fish and have a hard time catching the Snook. But any way as you can see in the pictures we caught some really nice fish the past week. This beautiful young lady holding the Snook of the week at 30 inches is a very nice fish and we had a few more fish that we pushing this size. This is the biggest and first keeper Snook that this young lady has caught.Come visit www.castawaychartersinc.com for pictures.

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