December was even warmer than November this past year and the warmth in this winter month did things to fishing that many have never seen and might not see again in the future. I think the fishing is finally going to change a bit, but we will see what this next month really brings.
Mostly, we have been fishing with live bait, which is very rare for this time of year. There are a few different reasons that fishing with live bait this time of year is rare. Many times we can't find bait in the bay and usually the water temperature is to cold for the fish to chase the shiner. Most of the time we are fishing with Shrimp, which is really good bait when it's cold. A few mornings we have fished with Shrimp, but it's been a bit difficult because Pinfish ate most of the Shrimp. We did have some good luck with Shrimp on a couple of the cooler days. For the most part, we have been using live bait and the live bait fishing has been great.
We've caught many different species of fish lately. On a couple of mornings that were cooler we started off catching Trout, Jacks, and Ladyfish. The Trout we caught last week were some of the biggest Trout we've caught the entire year. We had a number of Trout over 20 inches with the biggest toping out at 28 inches. Twenty-eight inches is a big Trout for the West Coast. I also saw a few swim by the boat that had to be over 30 inches. Fishing for Jack and Ladyfish has been phenomenal. Every time we put bait in the water we had a fish in seconds.
Although we didn't see many Snook or catch many Snook, we didn't do a lot of fishing for them. Most of these fish are up in the river this time of the year. We didn't spend much time in the river because we had the Red fish bite of a life time. We found a big school of Red fish that we got to fish for a couple of days and the bite was unbelievable. It was like fishing for Red fish in the middle of the summer. Every time bait hit the water, we had a fish on or either we needed to pull our bait in because a fish had taken it. Most all the Red fish were slot size, which is 22 inches to 27 inches. With all of the fish that we did catch we had about a dozen that were pushing 30 inches and one that toped out at 32 inches. Take a look the picture of it. This was a great fish and I hope to catch many more like it. I think that this next cold blast of weather will put us back to fishing with Shrimp, but we will just have to wait and see. Please visit www.castawaychartersinc.com.