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Tampa Bay - South Shore
Capt. Fred Everson
January 10, 2007
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report
Good fishing continued from the end of the year with unseasonably warm weather and higher than normal winter water temperatures.
Capt. Danny Guarino reports hot fishing for snook and trout in the Little Manatee River. He said he’s been netting his bait at the Skyway Fishing Pier, but said that it has been hard to come by. The river is full of snook, and they are active because the water temperature has been in the 70’s. I have also had several reports from other anglers and all say they are catching big trout in the river, and the usual big jacks.
Capt. Chet Jennings told me he’s been targeting snook in Cockroach Bay with success. He also confirmed good fishing in the Little Manatee River, but said that most of the snook he’s been catching there have been small.
Fishing on the flats has been just as hot as it has in the river. There have been several large schools of jack crevalle in the eight to ten pound class roaming the shallows south of Apollo Beach. On a recent charter we hooked up with two fish out of the first school we came upon and it took the better part of half an hour to get them to the boat. That was all she wrote, however, as they shut down thereafter. We made multiple casts into schools of fish swirling around the boat, but never got another strike. We finally gave up and went looking for shark.
It didn’t take long to find some. I simply idled around for 10 minutes and when I spotted a couple of fish, we put the anchor down and rigged a couple of shrimp under floats. We soon had a fish hooked up, and that got the other sharks excited. I had a frozen mackerel that I cut up for chum and that really got them going. We caught sharks for nearly three hours on live shrimp, under floats and also on jig heads. They were mostly in the 30 inch range, but I did see the biggest bonnethead shark I’ve ever come across. I thought it was a cobia at first and threw a soft plastic lure at it, but when the fish turned on the bait and followed it for a short distance I saw it was a shark. I would guess it weighed between 20 and 30 pounds.
Then we went looking for redfish on the change of the tide. We found a big school of oversized fish right away, but they wouldn’t eat anything. Two days later I went back to see if they were still there, and I found them scattered over the grass on a high tide. I didn’t catch any of the big fish, but did put one keeper in the boat. It hit a white Ripe Tide minnow on a red jig head.
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