Hooray for another outstanding week of fishing. Spring is starting early this year and the bite is HOT! We've mainly been fishing in back water for snook, redfish, and other species. However, if you are just looking for a bend in your rod, mackerel have shown up just off the beaches and shortly behind mackerel will be kingfish. The water temperature needs to be a little warmer for kingfish to really start showing up. It's TARPON TIME!!! Well, hopefully. I am going to try some tarpon fishing this week even though the water temperature is border line for them. Big bait is around so the fish should be here.
Snook fishing has been awesome lately. I really just can't believe the abundance of the snook around and the size of them is even more unbelievable. It's a good thing that so many snook are already around because snook season opens in March. Just because snook are not in season doesn't mean that we can't just go catch and release these great fish. Most of the time that is what people do anyway. I do want to share a great story with you about the fish of the week. I had a little girl who is about 5 years old on a charter last week and she decided to bring her own little batman fishing rod, which is a Zebco fishing rod with about 6 lbs test on it. She managed to catch a number of really nice trout on it throughout the day. We caught the limit of trout in less than 1 hour so we deiced to try to catch a few snook and redfish, and catch snook and redfish is just what we did. The little girl was still using her little fishing rod when she managed to hook into the snook of the day and the fish of the week. She managed to catch a 30 inch to 31 inch snook. I know that I don't need to tell you how hard this fish fought because you already know. The gentlemen in the picture did have to help her pull the fish in a bit, but it was awesome' the fish was almost as big as her!
We didn't have any trouble catching a mess of redfish this week and we found most of them in really shallow water. When the fish are in shallow water, we have to work harder to catch them, and that was the definitely the case last week. The hardest factor in catching these fish was being quiet enough in the shallow water not to spook them and in order to do that, I had to pole the boat a few hundred feet at times. With the wind blowing and the tide moving, finagling a boat full of people around can be difficult to do. However, it is well worth the hard work when you get on a great redfish bite like we did. Most of the redfish we caught were slot size, although we had a few bulls mixed in the bag.
The trout bite was just about as good as the redfish bite was. We didn't have any trouble catching a mess of trout for sure. Although we caught many trout, each day was little different. Sometimes just about every fish we put in the boat was slot size than at other times every 4th to 5th fish was a big enough fish to keep. One way or another we caught a lot of fish, which is a great thing to see after the red tide we had a couple of years ago. The trout are making a great comeback. By the way, in my previous report, I mentioned a guy that caught a great trout but didn't post the picture. Because people have asked to see the picture I have posted it with this report. Like I said in the other report, although he looks mad, he isn't. He just can't believe the size of this great trout! Please visit www.castawaychartersinc.com and book your trip today.