Fishing Report for Pine Island Sound to Sarasota Bay, Florida

Capt. Butch Rickey
June 17, 2006
Pine Island Sound - Saltwater Fishing Report

REPORT FOR THE WEEK ENDING 6/17/06 by Capt. Butch Rickey

As you might expect, the week was pretty much a blow out, with lots of wind and rain from tropical storm Alberto that passed to our north. We were in the path of the feeder bands for several days. And, that my friends, led to a couple of days of adventure on the high seas!

My good friend Dr. John Hitt was in town for some much needed R & R, and looking forward to fishing Sunday and Monday, but Alberto had other ideas. The forecast for Sunday wasn’t bad with storms after 2 PM. We figured we could get out and catch bait, run to Jensens and fuel the boat, and get in a few hours fishing on the best part of the tide. And, I expected that with the approach of the storm, we’d finally have a good bite.

It was overcast and dreary when we left his marina Sunday morning, but the sky didn’t look threatening. We headed to Picnic Island for bait, and although it took longer than usual, we had plenty when we were done. In fact, I think we overloaded his well, as two thirds of our bait wound up dying. If there is anyone out there who owns a 22 Coastline who’s had a problem keeping large quantities of bait alive, I’d love to hear from you.

One we were loaded with bait we were off to Jensens Marina. Between the pump price on the water and the amount of fuel John needed, he figured it would be a religious experience when it came time to pay, and it was! But, the dock master there is very nice, as are most all the folks at Jensens.

Not trusting the weather too much we decided to fish the Buck Key area so that we would be within hearing distance of the lightning alert at the nearby golf course on the end of Sanibel. Sometimes weather sneaks up on you without announcing itself with thunder, and that’s a scary thing.

Our first stop gave up nothing. Not a bite. But, I could feel in my bones that we were going to wear the fish out if we didn’t get run off by weather. We fished that first spot hard for about an hour, working it over well, and then conceded the point and moved on.

At the second spot, things were different. The first couple of casts went unscathed, but as I began to reel in a bait to check it, it got nailed. It was a nice redfish. I told John to crawl his bait, figuring the fish wanted it to be moving. The next fish was a nice bluefish, which we don’t see many of out on the flats. We missed a couple of good strikes, and then boated our second redfish. We had out limit.

We had been watching the weather closely, as the wind had kicked and it was beginning to drizzle. But, there was no thunder, and no lightning alert from the golf course. So, we decided we’d hang long enough to get our limit of reds, and then take off.

Turned out it was a foolish plan, as the sky had quickly become very ominous looking and it was really blowing. John and I agreed that we had stayed too long. As we prepped the boat for the ride home and got off the flat, the wind kicked wildly. The Sound was not a solid white frothing mess. I told John there was a hazardous weather exemption in the manatee laws, and we were going to use it. It would have been downright dangerous to venture into the sound right into a south wind that had to be gusting to 50 MPH at its peak. John asked me to take us home. Knowing it was going to be an ugly trip no matter what route we took, I suggested John sit on the rear deck behind the rocket launcher, knowing he’d get bounced less there, and thinking he’d remain much dryer. Ha!

We were off, staying in the backcountry wherever possible. The wind had kicked such that at times I though it was going to lift the bow of the boat and spin me around on the motor. I had that happen to me in a storm some thirty years ago in a small aluminum boat, and it scared the hell out of me. One minute I was running west, and an instant later I had been flipped around and was running east. The big Coastline was definitely trying to fly!

We were OK until I was forced to come out of the backcountry and run along the shore. We hit an area where the wind was stacking up easily six footers, and I knew that if I stopped or slowed down too much we’d likely be swamped. I was trying to find the right speed at which to hit the big waves head on, but I had almost no vision. We were taking huge waves over the bow, and the tornadic wind was throwing it right into my face. It was as it the console and windshield didn’t exist! I though I might drown right there at the helm. And, the boat was bouncing and beating so badly in the big waves that I could barely get my hands on the throttle. It was all I could do to hang on. This would be a real test of the Action Craft hull!

Finally, we cleared the worst of it, but we still had a long way to go, and I still had to cross the Sound at some point. The best plan in a big south wind is to run all the way to the causeway on the Sanibel side, and then cross over and run behind the causeway to the ramp. The puts you in a following sea for the most part, which is much easier to negotiate than head on into big waves that flats boats aren’t designed to take.

Finally, we cleared the causeway and were in the river, and the worst was definitely behind us. And, by that time it seemed to be laying down a little with the passing of that first big cell. It was still blowing, though, and the wind had shifted to the east, and we knew we’d have one more rough ride when we cleared Shell Island into the river.

Once we hit the idle zone at Shell Island, John was able to come back to the console with me. To my surprise, he was just as wet as I was, and I was soaked from head to toe. There were no dry spots, and I squished when I walked. John and I were relieved that we’d made it, but didn’t know how close we had actually come to not making it. We wouldn’t know until we got back to his dock.

John took us the rest of the way home up the river, and just nailed backing the boat into the lift. We began our unloading and cleanup procedure and as John leaned out over the stern to hook up the hose to the flushing port, he found a white crab trap buoy wrapped around the lower unit. But, once he got it untangled, it wouldn’t budge. Apparently, there was enough rope attached that it had gotten under the boat while backing into the lift, and it was now trapped there by the boat. So, we lowered the lift until she was floating and I pulled and pulled until everything came out. We had a good 12 to 15 feet of rope with the metal frame of a trap still attached to the end!

That was our miracle of the day. God was riding with us, for sure. For, if the rope had tangled in the prop, as they almost always do when you hit one with the lower unit, it would likely killed the engine right there. Beside possibly damaging the engine, we would probably have been immediately swamped with no way to control the boat, or we would have been blown up into the shallow water along the mangroves and swamped there. Either way it would have been bad news. The water had been so frothed up with whitecaps that the buoy was invisible. We really dodged a bullet on that one.

It wasn’t until Wednesday morning that I heard of another near disaster as a few of us guides gathered to assess the situation and decide whether to fish, or not. Capt. Kelly Kaminski told a frightening story of almost being swamped in 8 to 10 footers in front of St. James City. He told of really believing that he was going to loose his boat and customers, and that they would all drown. He took on so much water that he didn’t understand how they had not sunk his Lake and Bay. Thank God, it turned out to be an unforgettably wild ride instead of a disaster.

After meeting my customers, Kevin and Naida Maus for the first time, we mutually decided to reschedule to Friday. My gut told me the fish weren’t about to eat after a week of south winds, and it was still pretty windy, as well. I explained that we had a horrible tide to fish on Friday, but at least the weather should be back to normal.

Thursday morning, as I waited on my old friends Russ Hubbard and Jeff Stevens, I heard tales of horrible fishing on Wednesday, and only heard of three fish being caught! I had made the right call. I fully expected the same kind of result on this day, but Jeff and Russ assured me that this trip was about getting out on the water and enjoying our friendship, and catching was not mandatory.

Rumor was that bait had disappeared from Picnic Island, and Capt. Max Stanford said he’d gotten enough to fish out in front of St. James City the day before. So, that’s where a few of us congregated. Bait was not easy, but we got enough to fish.

It was dead calm and hotter than hell. My thoughts were of taking the boys out to the beach for snook. But, I figured it would probably still be rough in the gulf from the winds of Alberto. I opted on a beautiful spot on the east side where I know there a lot of fish of all kinds. Well, on this dead calm morning, there were millions of noseeums, too, and they quickly found us and began driving us crazy. Since they were the only bites we were getting, the beach suddenly looked like the only viable option to get away from the bugs.

Once we cleared the pass there were long swells, but no chop. Things seemed to be a go. But, once we got to where the snook are, things looked a bit different. The bottom contour on the beach is very different since the past two hurricane seasons. It’s very shallow quite a ways out from shore, now.

We decided we’d ease in toward shore and see how it felt. That was a mistake. We were still not even close enough to reach shore with a long cast when one of the swells broke right on my port side, just picking the Talon up and sweeping her toward shore like a surfboard! I fought to get the boat turned into the waves that we were now in, and the skeg was hitting the hard bottom. Russ was frantically trying to get the engine cranked, but it didn’t light on the first try. In what seemed an eternity, we took big waves over the bow. Russ had gotten the motor started and was trying to push us ahead, but the skeg was dragging. We took 4 or 5 big waves straight over the bow, and I’m convinced that if we hadn’t gotten past the break point we would have been swamped by the next wave, and the Talon would have been tossed up on the beach like a dead manatee.

Once we realized we’d gotten to safety and got our collective composures, we realized that the Talon was full of water. The cockpit was nearly full, and it has the biggest and best self-bailing cockpit I’ve ever seen. Once she drained down I attempted to take off, and when she tried to stand on her transom and wouldn’t go, we realized that we had a hull full of water, as well. We had indeed come very close to swamping the boat on that beach. It took quite a while for three 750 GPH pumps to empty the bilge. There was at least a foot of water in her. Were it not for Talon’s wisely putting the floatation on the underside of the cap, instead of in the bottom of the hull, we may have swamped out there!

Once we finally got the bilge emptied out we were off to fish in the Sound. We hadn’t gotten far when I saw a tarpon free-jump, and shut the Talon down to see if other fish would show. They did. We had tarpon spread over a pretty large area. We saw several other free-jumpers, and fish rolling here and there. But, they appeared to be spread out in the sand filled waters instead of in pods. We tried to fish them for perhaps an hour, trying to get close enough to rolling fish to cast to them. We never did. Russ and Jeff kept baits in the water hoping for a tarpon to find us, but they just weren’t eating.

We headed back inside, and decided to hit the Fosters Bay/Charley Pass area while we were right there. The water hadn’t moved all morning. It was like a stagnant pond. We fished from stump to stump for a while, and Jeff had the hot rod with a nice snapper and a big, beautiful speckled trout. That was it.

Russ had to be back in fairly early so that he could make an important meeting in Orlando that afternoon. We wanted to find some reds in the worst way, and headed to a different area. The reds weren’t forthcoming, and again Jeff did the impossible when he caught a pinfish on his shiner that was barely any larger than the shiner! A brilliant display of raw angling skill! It was too good not to take a picture of.

When the fish aren’t biting it makes the summer heat that much more unbearable. At 11:30 we headed to the oasis known as the Waterfront Restaurant. Ah! Relief is just across the Bay! It was great to see both the guys, but especially Jeff. I hadn’t seen him since before hurricane Charley. He’s a very busy guy. But, we’ve got a lot of fishing trips to do sometime in the future.

Thank God! Friday morning there was a nice breeze out of the northeast. I just hoped it would stay with us, both to keep us cool and to keep the bugs away. Kevin and Naida were a few minutes late, so the sun was already cracking the horizon as we ran up the river toward Picnic Island. I had decided to stop there first for bait, thinking that it should be back there now that things had settled down. With the lovely Naida at my side slinging chum, we had plenty of bait and were cleaned up and gone in an hour.

I thought that by this day the gulf would surely be settled down, and with an east/northeast wind, should even be flat. Ha! Wrong, again. We headed to Redfish Pass, and once we exited the pass we quickly found that it was quite rough. I was in no mood for a repeat of the day before, and turned around. Oddly, our breeze had turned into a pretty good wind of at least 15 MPH, and the Sound was pretty churned up once again. We headed back across the Sound to the spot I had tried to fish with Russ and Jeff the day before, confident there would be no bug problem, now. At about 40 MPH and the right angle on the chop, the ride wasn’t bad at all.

There was no one even in the area, happily, and we quickly go busy fishing. The water was crawling out and a blisteringly slow pace, but hey, at least it WAS moving! I did a fair amount of chumming trying to get things to happen, and we got quite a few pops on our chum.

I think Naida struck first blood with a nice redfish, which we released to fight another day. Kevin and Naida caught a few snook, and several nice mangrove snapper. All we needed was a trout for the Slam. Once things slowed, we fished around the area a bit looking for that trout, but we didn’t find it. We moved on.

WE headed north, and as we rode I kept an eye peeled for reds pushing in the now slick water. Our air conditioning breeze had left us as we got late into the morning. I knew we’d eventually have a sea breeze. We certainly found the redfish, and lots of them, but they were well scattered on the shallow flat. The tide was low and the water clear, and we couldn’t get close enough to catch one. Eventually, we moved on. I figured that by the time we got to the next spot the tide would be coming in.

The area was one I wanted to show Kevin, so that on subsequent trips he would have an idea of all the fishing opportunities there from his kayak. We not only found redfish on the flat, but tailing redfish. One was quite a large fish based on the size of its tail. It’s a beautiful thing to see, and Naida seemed to be enjoying watching them. But, they weren’t about to be caught. We tossed shiners under popping corks, and later sliced and diced pinfish, but it was nothing doing.

It was an awful tide, with no water moving until around the noon hour. The forecast called for a possibility of storms at 11:00 AM. I decided to head back closer to the ramp to finish up the day in case the weather kicked up on us. I told Kevin and Naida we’d stay out there as long as we could to get on some moving water and hopefully find some hungry fish.

The last spot was the charm. It took lots of chumming, but we got the action we were looking for. Kevin got that trout for the Slam. And he and Naida caught a good number of snook and a bunch of mangrove snapper. But for the possession limit we could have kept fifteen snapper, but Kevin and Naida weren’t taking home any fish. I kept five nice ones to make sashimi with that evening. Mangrove snapper make wonderful sashimi!

We fished until we were sure the bite was over. It was almost three o’clock, and there were thunderheads building fairly close by. It was time to head in. Besides, we were needing some of that Yamaha air conditioning at that point.

We had managed to make a great day of fun out of a really poor tide day. Naida even used the “awesome” word, to my surprise. They were great fun, and I really enjoyed our first day together. Hopefully, we can make it an annual thing, only we have to pick our tides better.

I will be on vacation next week, so there won’t be a fishing report for the week ending June 24th. Sorry. I’m going to stay out of the sun as much as possible. The summer calendar is slow, as usual. Things always slow down in the dog days of summer. But, if you can stand the heat we might have some good snook fishing on the outside, and some good redfishing on the flats on the good tide days. Let’s go fishing.

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