Tampa Bay Fishing Report

Capt. TJ Stewart
February 5, 2006
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report

What a nice Red fish!

It is still a little cold but it has warmed up enough where we started catching Snook and Red fish on the flats. Well it got warm enough where the Snook and Red fish started to show up in some of the spots where they show up when it start to warm up a little.

I will start with the sheepshead bite this has been very good. We have managed to catch a mess of them on each trip. Some of the fish we are catching are in the bay but most of the fishing has been around structure. Most of the sheepshead we have caught have been in the slot limit which means they over 12 inches. We have caught some very nice Sheepshead over the past week 4-5 lbs being the biggest each week these are some nice fish.

Then we have the Snook fishing we managed to get a couple of days were we got these fish to bite. Some days it was on artificial and other days we caught the fish on shrimp. When the water temp gets over 60 degrees these fish will start eating live bait but the live bait is shrimp right now because we have not been able to fined any shiners. This time of year you can usually go out to the sky way bridge and catch bait but I went out there the other day before the sun came up and threw the bait net for over an hour and did not catch the first bait. I tried this because the water temp is high enough for the fish to bite the shiners .but we did manage to catch some good fish on shrimp. If they would not bite on the shrimp we caught some fish on jigs.

We have been lucky with Red fish with both Shrimp and jigs. We had a little more luck catching the Red fish on jigs then we did the Snook but this is mostly because the location where we were fishing we usually catch more Red fish. When it is cooler we usually have more luck with Red fish on jigs. The cooler it is the slower you need to work the jig. We did catch some very nice fish on the shrimp though the biggest Red fish that we caught was a 32 inch Red fish it was on a jig. Man what a nice fish.Come see some pictures at www.castawaychartersinc.com.

More Fishing Reports:

• All Reports by Capt. TJ Stewart
• Tampa Bay Fishing Reports
• West Florida (Englewood to Cedar Key) Reports
• Florida Fishing Reports
• Browse All Fishing Reports