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Good Weather -- Better Fishing
Capt. Fred Everson
March 17, 2009
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report
After roaring in like a lion March weather turned nice, water temps rose a bit and the fish started to bite. It has been a long, cold winter, but it would appear that it is finally over. That means the best fishing of the year lies ahead.
Snook anglers will look for water temperature to rise to 70 degrees. That will bring the fish out of their winter haunts and onto the flats. This will coincide with the arrival of scaled sardines, and it's no coincidence. The hardy sardine is snook candy to anglers and snook alike. Snook will fatten up on the big sardines as they come onto the flats to spawn. Snook have had a long, lean winter and will feed on the hapless pilchards with abandon until they leave the flats to do some spawning of their own. The season for snook closes in May to protect the spawning linesiders as they congregate to procreate. Between now and then occurs the best snook fishing of the year.
Live baiters do most of the damage, but this is also peak season for those anglers who prefer to chuck artificials. The three best times to throw artificials at snook are sunrise, sunset, and after dark. You can catch the rare snook in broad daylight on an artificial, but those who target them with lures do it in low light or no light situations. Snook are basically nocturnal feeders unless you chum them up with live sardines. They are instinctively programmed to eat the weak and the infirm, and can't pass up a scaled sardine struggling with a hook in its nose, regardless of time of day, or stage of tide.
Capt. Nick Winger of Apollo Beach told me he was catching pompano on the Southshore flats. He said that the pompano were travelling underneath large rays, picking off everything spooked by the shadow. Winger said that every ray he saw had pompano with it. He caught them on a yellow pompano jig. He also said he caught a pair of cobia and a 31-inch snook.
The trout bite also began to heat up last week. Terry Akroyd of Ruskin stopped by to use my cleaning table to filet a nice mess of big trout. He said that live shrimp caught most of the fish on a rising tide in four feet of water.
A week of sunshine and warm weather brought the water temperature in the Gulf up to 73 degrees. That should get the bite going for every species of finned predator, and it should also bring some bait onto the flats.
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