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Tampa Bay Fishing Report
Capt. TJ Stewart
June 29, 2004
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report
The big that didn't get away!
Well it’s another great week of fishing to tell you about. We’ll start with the Redfish bite last week. The bite was a little different then it has been the last couple of weeks where we have been catching our Redfish first thing in the morning. Last week the bite was better in the afternoon. We had some trouble with the bait in the area where we have been catching the Redfish, it wasn’t that the fish weren’t there we just couldn’t keep bait alive, but in the same area in the afternoon there was no problem. Most of the day we fished for the Redfish we managed to catch 15-20 fish or more. A lot of the fish we caught this week were a little smaller they were still in the slot limit. Most of the fish were 18-22 inches with a few big one mixed in. The Redfish of the week was a 34 inch Redfish with is a nice fish.
The Snook bite was pretty good this week though not quite as good as the last couple of weeks but there are still a lot of fish. we didn’t have quite as good of tides to fish for the Snook or should I say we were fishing for other fish when the Snook bite would have been better. We had a couple days were we still caught over 20 Snook. The Snook of the week was a 35 inch Snook but the gentlemen that caught this Snook said that it didn’t pull half as hard as the Tarpon that he snagged earlier that day, but that’s a whole other story.
The Trout fishing is about the same. We are still catching about 20-30 Trout with some nice fish over 20 inches. Along with the Trout we have been catching mackerel, Jack Cravel, Cat fish, and a few Cobia.
Last but certainly not lease we have Tarpon. We have had some really good Tarpon fishing this week. We boated or almost boated a Silver King every single day. The fish story I’m going to tell you is about the Tarpon we thought we would never land. Man oh man, this fish wouldn’t give up and we finally figured out why. The Tarpon was hooked in the side of the gill plate it didn’t hurt the fish, it just made him fight twice as hard. This Tarpon that weighed about 120 lbs fought for over 2 and a half hours. It was an awesome fight. The Gentleman that fought this fish did a great job, he lasted longer then I probably would have! It was his first Tarpon that he had got to the boat so he didn’t give up. The whole week was awesome. Each day we hooked a fair amount of Tarpon. The Tarpon of the week was a huge fish weighing in at 175 lb weighed by my new scale. It was definitely a big fish. The gentleman did a great job, he managed to boat this fish in 45 minutes. Not too bad for the first Tarpon that he had ever seen no less had hooked. But I will tell you we did have the big one get away about 30 minutes before we had hooked a Tarpon that was easily over 200 lbs it was huge but he managed to get off.
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