This fishing report is going to be a mixture of good and bad news. Mother Nature has been doing her thing and throwing a wrench into our plans just as soon as we were getting on a good pattern. I’ll tell you what, let’s just start with the good and go from there.

The Good News

Fishing has been good! Not only has the inshore bite been solid, but the water has been beautiful, the bait has been plentiful, the Tarpon fishing has been excellent, and we’ve been catching Bull Redfish… yes… Bull Redfish while Tarpon fishing around the bars.

I’ve found that in most cases when I’m fishing in 10 feet of water or more fore Tarpon I’ll pick up a big Redfish or two. I haven’t caught any while fishing shallow, but in any gut, slough, ditch, rip, or depression it seems that the odds are good for catching a big Red Drum.




Bait has been plentiful (except for what I’m about to talk about when I get to the bad news). One thing that might help you when you are trying to bait up in clean water is to be mindful of how you approach the school. I like to get ahead of the bait and shut my engine down and let the bait come to me. Sometimes this just doesn’t work out and you have to go to the bait. In that case you’ll want to pay attention to the sun.

This week while trying to bait up in the morning, there were several of us dealing with skiddish schools of bait. My friend Capt. Greg Hildreth called me to tell me about a school of bait that he found not far from where I was. He added “Make sure you keep the sun in your face!”

What he means is that if you were to approach the bait with the sun at your back you will be silhouetted in the sun and “put down” the bait. They’ll either scatter before you can cast, or they’ll run out from under the net when you throw it.

So next time you try to bait up in really clean water keep this in mind.

The Bad

The bad news is that we had a cold front come through a few days ago and dump some rain on us. Around the same time we had a tropical storm pass by and push some big swells in.

The trouble with that is that the fish, both inshore and nearshore, were on a pretty reliable pattern. When you get strong winds and rough seas it will usually scatter the bait out, which in turn scatters the fish. Now the pattern that we were following before may be no good.

As of today, the bait fish are gathering back up. Yesterday was a total bait disaster. Looking forward, it should get right back to normal but we’ll have to get a new bead on the fish.

The Ugly

We have some big tides coming up this weekend. If you like to fish flood tides for tailing Redfish, you’re in luck. If you like fishing in clean water for Trout, you might want to have a back up plan.

One thing that I like to do when the tides get big is to fish around low tide. The last 2 hours of outgoing and the first two hours of incoming seem to be when I do best when we experience flood tides. I also tend to target Redfish over Trout. For me, catching Redfish in dirty water is way easier than catching Trout in dirty water.

The other option is to save your gas money for next weekend when the tides begin to straighten out again. That’s not my favorite way to do it as I’ve had some of my best days during big flood tides and with the water being really clean right now, it might not be all that bad.

To sum it all up, it might be hard to get a handle on what the fish will do over the next few days as we recover from the storm, the cold front, and the big tides. The good news is that we’ve had a solid bite that should hang on just enough to keep it interesting.