Thursday' trip was a bachelor party. With the big day this Saturday it was great way for the groom and friends to cut lose for a day. The trip was not starting until 10am so I decided to get a head start and ran to the flats near the East side of the Gandy bridge. Quality bait is a must and the Tampa Bay flats are loaded with whitebait, nice quantity and size. Look for the sandy potholes, toss quarter size pieces jack mackerel and wait for the feeding frenzy to start. Couple a quick casts are all I needed, use caution to not overfill your live wells. Too many bait can result in dead baits, frisky baits are key. On the run to the flats I ran past several schools of Jacks and on the 3rd school I decided to stop and play for awhile. Every cast had several fighting for my Clark Spoon. With time to kill, cooling water 78.1 and a nice outgoing tide I dropped the Power Pole on one of my favorite snook islands and the fun began immediately. No slot size fish but numerous 23-25' snook made for steady action. Time to pick up my guests, first 3 stops were in the Apollo Beach area as we had some very good success and had slams the last 2 trips. With the tide coming to a halt we managed only 2 small snook. We relocated to Little Cockroach with even less success unless you want to count catfish. David, Tony and Chris were very patient and a pleasure to have onboard. With basically no water movement I decided to change gears and move onto the deeper grass flats. Smart move, we managed to be in the middle of an invasion of Mackerel, Jacks and Ladyfish. The action was non stop with triple hook ups normal. Biggest challenge was getting fish un hooked quickly enough and get the angler back into the action. David hooked into a solid fish, after a few minutes were we all amazed to see a large snook that engulfed a Clark Spoon! Our day on the water was nearing an end; we left the fish biting for another day. Sunday we are running South to get back into the Bonita action. Earlier this season we did numerous trips all with outstanding results on Bonita 8-12 pounds.
