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Tampa Bay - South Shore
Capt. Fred Everson
May 7, 2007
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report
The full moon and murky water made for poor fishing this past week at a time of year when you would expect the action to be hot. Not the case from most of the anglers and captains I talked to, and certainly not in my own experience. Things should return to normal today or tomorrow.
This was a tough week despite near perfect weather. Low winds, no clouds and fair visibility on both sides of the bay, but the fish were just not there. I looked for cobia on two occasions, starting on the flats south of Apollo Beach, but found no sign of fish there. I look for the big ling to travel with large spotted eagle rays, but I saw none of those either.
I had a buddy up from Arcadia on Wednesday and we checked out Simmons
Park, idling up and down the flat twice without seeing a single fish. Then we tried the flats south of the St. Petersburg Pier and didn’t see anything there. Finally found a fish off Port Manatee, a single cobia, but that fish was skittish and we never got a shot at it before losing sight of it over the grass. We also looked at some buoys and range markers in the middle of the bay, and they were equally quiet. That same evening we fished the mouth of the Little Manatee River, but caught only ladyfish and catfish.
Capt. Larry Malinoski of Ruskin reported that the situation in deep water was nearly identical for much of the week. He said he hooked and lost a big grouper in the bay on Friday, but other than that the bite was slow.
I saw no sign of Spanish mackerel, but there were plenty of threadfins on the surface in the south end of the bay. The mackerel have yet to show up en masse, but should be here any day. The water temperature in the bay was up to 80 degrees yesterday.
Tarpon are in the bay. I saw a big one on the flats in front of Big Pass a week ago. I also saw a 7-foot bull shark on the flats in front of Sand Key, and hooked a blacktip shark there on a medium shrimp fished under a float.
For more information, call Capt. Fred Everson at 813 830 8890, or visit his website at tampabayfishingguide.com.
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