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Tampa Bay - South Shore
Capt. Fred Everson
July 12, 2007
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report
Local fishing was almost as hot as the air temperature last week, and that’s saying a lot. Capt. Larry Malinoski reported great catches of kingfish 20 miles out into the Gulf, with several smokers that topped 30 pounds. He caught Spanish mackerel and had a big cobia break off at the boat. The kingfish are still here because of the bait. Great schools of bait are blanketing the surface of the Gulf just outside the Skyway, and all the gamefish are feasting on it.
I was invited by Capt. Mark Thomas who just returned from Boca Grande for a morning of fishing off Egmont Key.
“You gotta see this!” he told me over the phone. “Spanish Mackerel, kingfish, sharks, jacks, bonito – everything is tearing up pods of bait wadded up on the surface.”
We left the Cockroach Bay boat ramp before daybreak on a dead flat calm bay. 20 minutes later we were past Egmont Key and there were clusters of birds hitting the surface in locations hundreds of yards apart. There were literally fish everywhere.
We cast chrome spoons into the first melee and came up with big Spanish mackerel. Then we saw a school of bonito crashing through pods of bait a hundred yards away. Capt. Thomas eased the boat over and pitched a spoon into the froth and hooked up with fish the shape of a football, except it was twice the size. These fish are mostly called bonito by local anglers, but in reality they are little tunny, a similar fish in the same family. Either fish will take a ton of drag and tear up your tackle.
After landing a couple of fish we moved on to another pod of bait where we could see the fins of several big sharks slashing through the ball. Capt. Thomas through a large chunk of cut bait into the middle of the pod and hooked up immediately with a shark that probably weighed a hundred pounds. I had to put the boat in gear and follow the fish for a while or it would have stripped the spool of all 200 yards of line. 20 minutes later we had the fish alongside the boat, and I reached over the side and cut the wire leader with a pair of pliers. No way were we going to put a hundred pounds of angry blacktip in the boat.
For the better part of three hours we were constantly hooked up with a variety of fish that included bonito, black tip sharks, Spanish mackerel, and jack crevalle. It was so good that Capt. Thomas offered to do it again the next day.
We left the boat ramp at the same time the following day with Capt. Billy Jordan of Ruskin in company. There was a bit more wind than the previous morning, and a big thundercloud held us up under the Skyway for about an hour as we waited for the rains to pass. What a difference a day makes. Brown pelicans streamed by us in formation, skimming the water, but never finding any bait. We never caught the first fish all day, even though we did find several schools of little mackerel around Port Manatee.
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