That’s really the only question that I have for my customers right now when they call. Inshore fishing is good right now (generally speaking as the moon made the water a bit dirty) but a lot of the fish are small. The good news is that bigger Trout and Redfish will become more and more easy to find over the coming weeks.



However, if you want to get into some really big fish now, just skip inshore fishing altogether and fish on the beach side for a target rich environment.
Lately we have been focusing mainly on Tarpon fishing, but in our quest for the silver kings we have run into everything from Sharks of all shapes and sizes, to Jack Crevalle, Bull Redfish, and we’ve even had a smoker Kingfish air it out near the boat a time or two.



On most days the bait has been easy to locate and catch, but as always there are those days where it isn’t so easy. If you’re having trouble locating pogies, just go by the rule of thumb that they will be further offshore around low tide, and closer in around high tide. Watching for pelicans diving is always a good idea, but sometimes shutting the boat down and just using your eyes and ears for a few minutes will pay off when the birds aren’t on the bait.

If you choose to go after the larger fish this week, you might want to choose your rig and bait wisely. For Tarpon I like a bigger leader and bigger baits. My leader will be in the 80 to 125 lb range and I want to fish with the biggest pogies I can find.

If I’m fishing for Bull Reds, My leader will be between 4o and 80 and smaller baits will be ideal.

There is a happy medium by fishing mid sized leader and medium baits, but then you are compromising on both sides. What I have been doing is fishing 1 bottom rig, 1 free line, 1 line with a light weight on the leader, and 1 float line. I put smaller baits on the bottom rig because that is most likely where the bull reds will strike. All of my other lines will have big turbo pogies. Still sometimes I will have a bottom bait come back scaled and smashed from a missed Redfish, but we are also jumping Tarpon on the bottom rig from time to time (3 today) so I don’t mind a miss due to over sized bait.

If you just want to target bull reds… simple. Four lines on the bottom with medium / small live or dead pogies, squid, cut mullet, or crabs. Your chances for Tarpon will be diminished, but you can be a lot more confident about catching some Redfish. One word of caution of you go this route… be ready to fight small sharks all day long.



That’s it for this one. I will be Tarpon fishing almost exclusively for the next couple of weeks, so if you have an inshore fishing report please send it to me and I will be happy to share it.