Tampa Bay Fishing Report

Capt. TJ Stewart
October 4, 2004
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report

The ones that got away!

Here we are to talk about another great week of fishing. For the first time in a while there is no hurricane coming at us and it doesn’t hurt my feelings at all. Hopefully the tropical season will take a break for awhile and give us time to get up! With the weather the water temp has been going up and down. As the temp drops it usually helps with the bite with some fish. We are going to start with the Tarpon fishing . We didn’t get to do much this week. Matter of fact we only got to fish one day for about one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. We started the morning off with a lot of trouble catching bait. I did manage to get a few good size baits but for the most part it was very small which can make it a little tougher. I picked the guys up about 6:30 am we got to the rock pile just after the sun can up. We managed to hook one Tarpon for sure because the gentlemen in the photo got to fight it for a while before the Silver King wore threw the leader line and broke off not too far from the boat but we did manage to see the Tarpon jump a few times. We did however catch some very nice Mackerel, a couple of Grouper and a nice Shark. The Snook bite this week went up and down one day we couldn’t keep them off our line and the next we only caught about 10. On the days the bite was better we managed to catch 30 fish or better. The Snook of the week was a 29 inch Snook this is the one we landed. We won’t get in to the big one that got away but that’s how they get that big!. If the Snook weren’t biting the Red fish were in a frenzy. We had a few days where I know we caught over 30 Red fish .Im not kidding when I say we tried moving to catch bigger Snook and we caught bigger fish but they were Red fish. Which is a huge problem but not really because we caught the Red fish of the week a 32 1/2 inch Bull Red. This fish put up a great fight. The gentlemen in the picture thought the fish was never going to come in. To end the week off we fished the De Soto Fishing tournament which we tied for third place and the guys that had second place had only four more points then us which was a little upsetting. I don’t even want to talk about the fish that got away that would have put us over the top but that is how it goes we still had a lot of fun.

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