Marco Island, Ft. Myers & Boca Grande
Capt. Scott Hughes
July 23, 2000
Fort Myers - Saltwater Fishing Report
Get Scorched!......by Tarpon and the Sun.
These are the dog days of summer and the fishing is as hot as the weather. There are a couple of ways to beat the heat and have some of the best fishing of the summer. The first is to fish late or early in the day. Most of the thunderstorms occur between 1:00 PM and 4:30 PM. Also, night fishing can offer a break from the scorching heat. However, there is a drawback to the night fishing deal. Mosquitoes can be extremely bad this time of year and navigating the shallows can be tricky. Personally, I don’t notice the bugs if the fish are biting and you’ll get used to them after 10 years or so. Anyway, the fishing has been hard to beat the past week and I’ll predict that next week will be as good.
The tarpon have been the focus of my efforts this week. If you follow my reports regularly you probably know that if tarpon are around they will keep me distracted enough to forget about any other type of fishing. We are still catching extremely large tarpon in Charlotte Harbor. Almost all of these fish are pushing 100 pounds and many are in the 150-pound class. Every trip this week hooked at least 1 large tarpon with some trips jumping 4 or more. We could have caught more but we have been dodging thunderstorms all week. Large thread herring have produced the best, but pinfish on the bottom have caught a few when bait has been tough.
Marco Island and the 10,000 Islands have small 10-40 pound tarpon in the deeper holes of the back bays. I have been getting these fish to hit live sardines. Capt. Andy Bostick has been having fair success getting his customers to hook some of these small tarpon on flies along with small snook in the same area.
Snook have been a little on the slow side with one major exception. Last Friday Rob Zeidler fishing with his dad caught an estimated 27-pound snook and his dad caught a 14-pound snook using live sardines. We were fishing a small cut that had some tarpon in it and just as the tide started to rise the fish turned on. We had four fish on in five minutes until a major thunderstorm ran us back to the dock. That’s about the way my snook fishing has gone this month. The key to successful snook fishing in Marco is catching quality sardines and hitting the correct tide without getting struck by lightning.
Big bruiser jacks in the 5-15 pound range are still giving my customers a workout when I fish out of Marco Island. They will be near clean deep water near a pass and will take live bait, jigs, top water lures and flies. We have catching up to 30 fish in the 10-pound range on a half-day trip. It really depends on how many you want to catch. We literally have been getting hooked up with every bait when the tide is rising.
Sharks are the last types of fish that we have been catching with any regularity. We are catching about a dozen sharks in a half-day trip while tarpon fishing. Most of these sharks are blacktips in the 10-pound range with a couple of big boys each trip that pushes 60 or more pounds. A few hammer and bonnet heads are mixed in with the occasional bull shark. We have catching them with pinfish and herring but a half or live mullet will bring sharks of all types and sizes.
Good Luck!
Capt. Scott Hughes
Blackwater Fishing Charters
863-946-9171
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