Matt Z. with a nice mid winter shallow water red on fly!
Cool… is the word of the month, so what does a fishing guide do…adapt. How do we adapt, we adjust the departure times to warmer hours, watch the tides and be selective with the different types of baits we use. Snook have not been very active but we’re still getting some decent reds, pompano, a few trout as well as the usual winter times species of snapper, sheepshead and others.
With Matt, we were trying to sight fishing and this red slowly mosied out from the mangroves following the fly, Matt with the patience of Jobe, kept stripping slowly and the red finally, sipped the white streamer and turned…fish on! Great take and great fish.
Below, long time customer Bruce P. landed a beautiful 16LB, 36″ snook throwing live bait against the mangroves, about 12′ water. Brucee saw the the fish come out and eat the bait. Luckily the snook headed to open water otherwise we may not have landed the fish. We were only using 10# test. Nice job Bruce.
Going forward we have some good tides coming up in February. The full moon on the 14th of February produces big mid days highs and low water around sunrise and sunset. Fourteen days either side of the 14th the tides are opposite. All good tides to work with. Higher tides are better for redfish. They prefer to feed up against mangrove shorelines.
I’m getting a fair amount of calls for the spring tarpon run so feel free to give me a call if you’d like to discuss one of my favorite times of the year to fish.
Capt. Mark – 239-450-9230
