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It’s a great time to test shoreline waters with your fly rod

With redfish milling around shorelines and snook on the move towards the beaches for their summer break, now’s a great time to explore your favorite stretch of shoreline with that old battle-scarred plug or hot new fly pattern. Casting a shoreline with lots of structure and some moving water with an 8 weight fly rod and a few weedless flies is definitely my cup of tea in springtime and a good way to run into a personal best, fly caught snook or tough, chunky, orange redfish. A floating 8 weight fly line with a short heavy front taper to turn over big flies, poppers and hair bugs in ...

For some, there’s no better prize than a big bucketmouth

With tarpon already arriving, snook on the move westward out of their winter sanctuaries, good trout and redfish action taking place, and grouper to permit offshore, what more could an angler want?  Southwest Florida is pretty close to a saltwater angler’s paradise and why many of us live ...

Fishing for pompano — a tasty treat

When cruising along and chrome fish start jumping out of the water in your wake, you’ve just run over or startled a school of pompano, one of Florida’s tastiest fish. Slow the boat and quietly circle back, then wind drift or lightly use the trolling motor while fan casting the area with ...

Stable weather pattern means good fishing inshore and off

Pick your weather window and enjoy Gulf of Mexico reef fishing on nearshore structure or venture out to the hundred foot mark and beyond. Starting Tuesday, we’ll enter into a sunny, stable weather pattern, with light winds. That’s if you believe the weather wizards and their predictions.  One local captain reported fine catches and early-in-the-trip limits of red grouper this week (22 to 32 inches) out in the 85 to 120-foot zone with grunts, squirrels and pinfish the choice bottom baits. His weapon of choice for these deep grouper is a heavy jig loaded up with ladyfish meat ...

Warm week brings anglers a mixed bag of winter fish

While many up North are scraping ice off their frozen windshields and sliding around on deadly black ice, we are enjoying the 80s and hopefully will lock into the same fantastic warm winter weather pattern we enjoyed last season. This past week inshore anglers caught and released a typical mixed bag of winter fish. Trout after trout, sheepshead, rat reds and small snook were the main players with a few delicious pompano mixed in. After releasing a boatload of trout, one angler wanted to spend the rest of his time looking for just one nice picture-sized snook before driving back to ...

New salt water single inline hooks are a win-win for anglers and fish

Each year we see more new salt water hard plastic lures being equipped with single inline hooks rather than treble hooks. The excellent Rapala Coastal Series twitch baits are a good example. I’m sure soft tissue mouthed fish like seatrout that readily bite small crankbaits and top waters and, that often suffer bad wounds from the treble hooks are happy about this direction as well. Due to the long shape of a snooks head, eye and gill location and their fondness for long minnow style hard baits usually equipped with three sets of trebles, one of those three treble hooks often causes ...