It's getting to be that time of the year. The wind is blowing and the temp is dropping but the fish are still biting. Not to sure how much more fishing we will be doing with live bait well that is the shiners. When the water temp drops below 60 degrees it's shrimp time. Fishing with shrimp can be just as good as shiners sometimes. Some of the biggest Snook and Red fish I have ever caught have been on shrimp.
Along with using shrimp we will also start fishing with lures as well which at times can be really good also..
Let's start by talking about something a little different that is the great Flounder. The colder water temp has moved a lot of these great fish up in the bay. All of the Flounder we have found have been in the sand spots along the channel. This means where the grass drops off into a sandy spot then on the other side the grass comes back up. More then just Flounder are in these areas. Most of the time we are fishing for Snook or Red fish and happen to catch the Flounder. You can say this is a really good catch a lot of people would rather catch these great fish especially if they want to take some fish home to eat. Most of the action comes on days where it is a little too cold for the Snook or Red fish to be active with the live bait. It doesn't get too cold for the Flounder to bite. I will say it's a hard fish to target but we did have a few days where we caught 5-10 plus fish. As you can see in the picture we did manage to catch a few big ones.
That brings us to the Red fish bite, well we didn't better our last weeks catch but we did have a lot of great fish. We caught a lot of Red fish over the 30 inch mark but none over that 40 inch mark. We had a few pushing the mark. I want to say the Red fish of this week was a fish that's 36-38 inches. This is still a bull Red, any fish over 30 inches is going to put up a fight of a life time and a great catch. I didn't get a chance to put the new pictures up for the big Red fish last week so I did this week with the new fish. That is a big Red fish. Last week we also found a big school of slot size fish so we had no trouble having a few great fish to bring home.
Snook, well this has been another story. We have had some great days but then with the cooler weather we had some little slower days but this is expected. We did manage to catch a few nice fish but you can say this new mark is a little tougher to hit. A 28 inch
Snook is a big fish you can't even keep a Red fish if it is that big. One of the biggest problems over the past week has been how clear the water has been. I say this is a problem it's nice to be able to see the fish your fishing for but this will cause a little trouble getting the fish to bite. So of course you have to do something a little different. With this we have dropped down in leader size but with this some of the bigger fish have been breaking us off. It's what you call a catch 22 but what I have always said is you have to get them on your line before you have to worry about losing them.
Tarpon, well I think we had our entire fall run that we're going to have. The water temp dropped too much out and around the big bridge. If the temp goes back up in the mid 80's next week this might bring them back.
