Inshore Fishing

Doug Bryan, a St Petersburg local, and his buddies fish the Johns Pass Jetty and Johns Pass bridge area nearly daily. This past week they have been catching pompano, sheepshead, speckled trout, and whiting using live shrimp and a variety of lures. The water has been very murky this past week due to the strong cold front that blew past us this past weekend, but that didn’t slow down the sheepshead bite at all. Normally behind the fronts, if anything the sheepshead seem to turn up a bit and really cooperate well and seem to flourish in the muddier murky and cooler waters behind a front. They love shrimp, fiddler crabs, sand fleas, cut pieces of clam, barnacles, and even oysters right around the structure inside the pass with 15-20lb leader, 1-2ot hook and just enough weight to hold your bait against the structure. You can also get lucky and nail them as they cruise the sandy areas along the jetties looking for sand fleas or shrimp or their next pile of structure to hide out in and feed on. Pompano love the live shrimp, fiddler crabs, or sand flies around the sandy areas adjacent to our jetties, bridges, or especially the beaches using 10-15lb line and a 2ot hook with little to no weight, but the bait has to be on the bottom so whatever weight you need to hold bottom is imperative. The pompano will also hit artificial lures like doc’s goofy jigs or Nekid ball jigs or the pompano jigs which is essentially a small flair hawk style jig with a much shorter skirt. Speckled trout are much like the pompano in the type of tackle to use while bait fishing for them, but they love mostly live shrimp or the live greenbacks. My favorite lures for them would be the DOA shrimp or the Mirror Lures, but a spro jig will also work too. Whiting is fairly easy to catch all you need are some live shrimp weighted to the bottom around the surf of the beaches and you can do pretty well on these good eating fish that forage the bottom looking for an easy meal. The red fish or red drum have been feeding around the passes too reports Brian Harris, our bait catching extraordinaire at Hubbard’s Marina, he’s been getting some nice ones around the dock lights of Johns pass at night working lures very slowly along the bottom on the edges of the dock lights.

Nearshore Fishing

This week the near shore action has been a little deeper due to the stirred up conditions caused by the rough weather from last weekend’s front. We have had to fish closer to 11-13 miles to get out past that dirty water the second half of the week, but directly behind the front the fishing was very poor. Keep in mind it does take a few days behind a big front for the waters to calm down, clear up and all the variables to return to normal before the fishing turns back on. However, when everything does calm down the bite really gets hot because the fish haven’t fed for a while. On the flip side, as a front approaches the bite gets super-hot that’s why we had such great fishing yesterday as today’s front approached our local waters. This week we saw some hogfish action, some kingfish action, lots of lane snapper, and as always the grey snapper or white grunts, porgies and a few seabass were pretty steady through the week once we were able to get past the dirty, murky and sandy waters that hugged the beach this week due to the rain, wind and waves of the last cold front. The bite on the kingfish has been a little slower this week, but the blackfin tuna made up for it. Yesterday’s 10 hour all day was fishing the deepest near shore waters and they brought in a couple very thick blackfin tuna caught on the flat lines. Plus, the red grouper bite turned on for us nicely during yesterday’s all day with the biggest catch of fat red grouper we have seen aboard then ten hour all day in a while. Plus, we got a few hogfish, lane snapper, vermillion snapper and then some heads and tails like the grey snapper and porgies to fill out the box. Overall this past week started very slow but the fishing got better and better and better until today’s front ruined our fishing opportunities due to weather rolling in.

Offshore Fishing

The bite offshore has been great all week, these offshore waters are less affected by the fronts since the water isn’t as easily disturbed due to its distance from shore and its depth. Early this week the waters were still a little bumpy so it prevented us from getting as far as we would have liked but we still got plenty of nice red grouper, scamp grouper, mangrove snapper, monster vermillion snapper, some yellowtail and the kingfish too aboard the Flying HUB 2 filming trip with salt strong. The scamp grouper bit the small pinfish, squid strips and even the cut threadfins. Once you find one scamp there’s typically a few more down there ready to eat. They are mostly found at depths of 180-220 foot as of late. The red grouper have been eating a bit of everything from the flat fall or slow pitch jigs to the live pinfish, to the squid strips and even the cut threadfins. The secret weapon for a fat red grouper is double threadfins hooked through the eyes but you have to drop that very slowly to prevent it from spinning on the way down and tangling your main line. The red grouper and scamp grouper tackle of choice would be 60-80lb leader, 6oz lead, and a 7ot circle hook. However, the red grouper have bit best in 170-200ft of water and also around 90-120 foot of water. The deeper you get the harder it is to get your baits past the hungry, aggressive and prolific red snapper to the bottom where the red grouper hang out. The triggerfish love a small piece of squid on a 6ot hook and 40-60lb test. The huge vermillion we are finding were high up in the water column hitting strips of squid on the way to bottom on the similar tackle that we were landing the triggerfish on. Tuesday the weather was a bit better and that allowed us to get to the deeper waters and the bite was great again but we were targeting the red snapper for salt strong for their upcoming ‘red snapper mastery course’ but while targeting those we landed dinosaur sized vermillion, a boat limit of triggerfish, and a GIANT 80+lb amberjack on a bonita strip. Mid-week the bite slowed a bit offshore as the high pressure settled into the gulf of Mexico but the big red snapper, gag grouper and the vermillion snapper kept us busy while we were able to land a few nice keeper red grouper too. Unfortunately Thursday when the bite was the hottest as that front approached we did not have a boat fishing the deeper offshore waters, but I would assume based on the crazy good near shore bite that Thursday was probably an epic bite offshore too! The good news is that offshore the pelagic action is off the chain. Lots of kingfish out there biting well, blackfin tuna are fairly thick, plus wahoo and the occasional sailfish are starting to show up and be caught too!