Sunday was a fun day. We started the day on the flats chumming white bait and pinfish. My anglers Chris and Brandy made for a great team. Chris chummed and Brandy took care of the mess forming in the live well that was from all the debris and small fish in the net. Grass flats while ideal for bait makes a mess. I give my clients the options to come and catch bait if they want to see how it's done. Catching bait never counts towards fishing time.
It was still to breezy and water still churned up on the beach for sight fishing snook so I made the run to Tampa Bays eastern shoreline. The outgoing tide was not for another few hours so we slugged it out with the incoming and slack tide. The snook did not want to play, talk about lock jaw. This was the same location that was so productive the day prior. I could see snook cruising the shoreline passing bait after bait. Finally some ladyfish moved in to provide some action. The ladyfish bite got hot only to have a not very smart boater come flying around a corner on plane and run over the spot we were fishing. Keep in mind this area is slow speed only, Captain Steven was not a happy camper. More than messing up the fishing it was unsafe and could have had a bad ending.
Next stop was on a grass flat for trout. Seems lockjaw was the theme of the day. It took 30 minutes to finally get a trout to chew. Several really large ladyfish were caught but that was it. Yet another move into some deeper canals and bridges. Big pinfish worked as we hooked several large snook and ended up with multiple cutoffs. Keeping this big fish out the pilings was next to impossible. We even took a keeper size grouper on a large pinfish. A quick review of my leaders back on the dock told the story, they looked like they had been in a knife fight.
Overall a slow day of fishing but lots of fun with Brandy and Chris onboard.
Captain Steven
