Finally this week the weather cooled down slightly, with the change came strong northeasterly winds that hampered fishing most of the week. Extreme low tides were also encountered as a combination of the moon phase and the stiff winds.
To say the tide was low at the end of the week was an understatement, those late morning low's looked like someone pulled the cork and let all the water run out! It's normal to have really low tides in November and with the strong wind from the northeast it made for an extreme low and not much for a high. With these circumstances we found fishing difficult with a slow bite.
The best action we had came in Matlacha Pass where schooling jack crevalle were pushing bait schools into the shallows. They weren't little jacks and there were a lot of them, at least three schools working up and down the same drop-off. One great thing about jacks is they are almost always hungry, and this bunch was no exception. Another is the fight, it's been a while since I have been on schools in the ten to fifteen pound range, they are brutes! We had double and triple hook-ups and darn near spooled the reels more than once. If you want to wear out some anglers get them in a school of these guys. I mentioned last week that bonito was one of the hardest fighting fish around; I sure would like to strap a line to the tail of bonito and to a jack and see who would win the pull off.
We also found a few snook in northern Pine Island Sound,(none over twenty-six inches)but the bite was pretty tough. We hit one hole and caught half a dozen, that was our best snook stop as most often we would get one or two to chase the bait but no takers. We also caught and released a few trout and undersize gag grouper while snook fishing. All of our fish were caught on live bait, both shiners and pinfish,
I'm happy the temperatures have dropped slightly but enough with the wind. Those that have fished with me know I like a breeze for many types of fishing but not gale force and for sure not out of the northeast and east. Everybody has heard that old adage "winds out of the east, fish bite the least", there's a lot of truth to it!
