Tampa Bay Fishing Report

Capt. TJ Stewart
November 1, 2005
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report

A little rough!

Well I don’t think the wind is ever going to quiet. Ever since the hurricane plus cold front came through the wind has been blowing 15-25 every day. The wind is blowing out of the North so it won’t warm up but when it does the fishing is going to go off again. The past week the fishing was a little slow but the reason for it is because it has been so cold. The water temp dropped over 20 degrees that is a big change and it freaks the fish out and you have a hard time getting the fish to eat. Well I said the fishing was slow all week but this is not all true this past Saturday was really good.

I will start with the Snook, we did manage to catch a few of these fish each trip but we had to work for it. The most luck that we had was in the river in some of the warmer water they would eat a little better. The darker the water the faster it warms up so in some of the places the water temp was over 5 degrees warmer. This can make a big difference in the bite usually when as long as the water is over 60 degrees you can get the fish to eat pretty good but I think it was just too big of a change.

Then we have the Red fish these fish moved around a lot with this cold blast. It was a little harder to find the fish but once we did we caught a bunch of Red fish. We did have a Red fish tournament this week on Saturday. We had a really good time and caught a lot of nice fish. We did have to work for it a little bit at first using artificial lures to catch the fish in the morning but once the water warmed up we managed to find some fish that would eat live bait and got them to eat good and managed to catch a bunch of fish. We got one really nice Red fish 26 ½ inches 7.28 lbs this was a really nice fish. In these Red fish tournaments the fish have to be slot size 18-27 inches so this was a good fish. The other was a little smaller it was 24 inches 4.5 lbs. They were pretty good fish but 1 st place beat us by .05 lbs. Yes I know it’s not much but it does not take much. We ended up in 2 nd place. But we had a lot of fun and it is starting to warm back up so the fishing next week should be fantastic. To see pictures visit www.castawaychartersinc.com.

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