May 25, 2007
INSHORE - The inshore fishing has been good when you could get out of the wind. The East side of the river is about the only place you were able to fish. The die hard snook anglers are making their last push to land a keeper before the season closes on June 1st. The anglers that fish the Turning Basin every morning at 3 to 4am have reported a couple of keeper fish this week. They were using hand picked shrimp. They did release several short snook. The North Bridge has been producing a few snook at night on the out going tide. The trout bite has been steady around Bear Point with most of the fish under 3 pounds. Try a top water bait up until about 8am then switch to a shrimp and popping cork. I did get one report of 2 short tripletail being caught to the south of the power lines. Also, in that same area the black drum bite has been very good if you could stand the wind. The snapper are still moving in along the channel edges with fish to 2 pounds being reported.
OFFSHORE - The offshore bite has great last Thursday and Friday before all of this wind started. On Thursday Frank Fitzgerald and crew on the At Last went out to 400 feet of water and landed 3 dolphin to 19 pounds and 2 wahoo -- 22 & 40 pounds. On Friday they had 7 dolphin to 25 pounds. On Friday we had 8 boats go out and they had from 6 to 18 dolphin per boat and 6 sailfish releases between them. Capt. Dan Winter on the Killin Time with anglers Alfred and Lucky had 6 dolphin to 20 pounds and 1 sailfish release in 210 feet of water. The dolphin were 110 to 250 feet of water on Friday. On Saturday we had 2 boats try to go out but they were back at the dock in 1 hour. Hopefully the wind will lay soon and the fishing will take off!
TEEN ANGLERS - The local chapter of Teen Anglers will be starting their new fishing season in August when school starts back up. If you have a boat and would like to volunteer to take a Teen fishing just go to the website at www.teenanglers.org and sign up.
Teen Anglers is a school based program from the 12 to 18 age group. We also have a Junior Teen Anglers for the 5 to 11 age group. You can get all the info at the website.
If you would like to report a catch you can call me at 772-201-5770 or e-mail me at cward11605@aol.com. You can also reach me on the web at www.captjoeward.com
Capt. Joe Ward
Capt. Joe's River Charters
