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Tampa Bay - South Shore
Capt. Fred Everson
February 19, 2007
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report
Winter returned after a week of wonderful weather, and pretty good fishing. Capt. Danny Guarino reported that snook fishing in the Little Manatee River was very good. He told me he caught scaled sardines at the Skyway Fishing Pier, and said that it was mostly small, but big enough to put a dozen snook on the boat, two of which were keepers.
Capt. Chet Jennings caught bonnethead sharks with his clients on the flats south of Apollo Beach. He chummed them in by cutting up scaled sardines. I have been on those same fish this past week, but couldn’t get them to eat a shrimp – dead or alive. I looked for them on Wednesday, but saw very few. Apparently they deserted the flats ahead of the approaching cold front, but they should be back once the water temperature stabilizes. It was still in the low sixties this past week.
Redfish were feeding ahead of the front. I drifted the flats from the Simmons Park Boat Ramp to Apollo Beach with a brisk south wind on Wednesday, and caught a few fish on Rip Tide jigs rigged with their 4 inch white mullet. Skies were clear, and so was the water, but 15 knots of south wind restricted visibility to the point where every fish I saw was scooting before either of us could get a cast at him. We caught all our fish blindcasting downwind as far as we could throw – about all you can do with that much wind. The drift was good, however – parallel to the shoreline – though the fish were in very shallow water. I had to use the pushpole every 15 minutes or so to get us over sandbars and humps. Wading would have been an option, but the fish were so scattered that it made more sense to cover a wider area by drifting with the wind.
For more information, call Capt. Fred Everson at 813 830 8890, or visit his website at tampabayfishingguide.com.
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