Blow Wind Blow
Capt. Fred Everson
March 28, 2008
Tampa Bay - Saltwater Fishing Report
Wind and cold fronts continued to keep anglers on the docks and the fish safe. The good news is that the full moon of March is what the old timers here in West Central Florida call the end of winter. Not much to complain about this year. We had very few days where the temperature dipped into the low 40's and, and only one serious drop in water temperature that occurred just after New Year's Day. Other than that, I would say that fishing has been pretty good.
Capt. Danny Guarino said the catch and release action on snook was good most of the winter, and the bite continued right into March. Capt. Chet Jennings and Capt. Mark Thomas filed similar reports. Guarino also said the trout bite in Cockroach Bay was hot. I spoke with him one day last week as he cleaned three limits of trout for his clients.
Wind has made it tough to get on the flats to look for anything, but if you are patient and have the luxury of picking the days with the least amount of breeze, the fish are there. I was out in the middle of the month in search of cobia with Tom White, proprietor of Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa. We found a keeper swimming all by himself in three feet of water right away. The fish chased an eight-inch plastic eel twice, and actually bumped it once. After that he figured out what was going on and would have nothing to do with us. I finally gave up after putting several good casts across his nose and started to look for other fish.
Clouds moved in and out, and then it became completely overcast for a while.
"Let's go shallow and blind cast for snook and redfish" I said to Tom White.
We made a couple of drifts and didn't see much, but conditions were bad enough that any redfish or snook would have been too close to the boat to catch.
The wind was out of the north so I tried another drift along the edge of the grass where we saw some bonnethead sharks. We rigged some shrimp for them, but nobody looked interested. Then I saw three fish laid up motionless on the bottom, just like nurse sharks often do. But these were smaller, and I was sure they were cobia. A shrimp rigged on a Rip Tide jig head brought an immediate strike and it was game on with what turned out to be a short cobia. Tom landed the fish and it was released unharmed after taking a quick picture. It's the first time I have ever seen cobia holding on the bottom like that, but Capt. Chet Jennings later told me he's also seen it several times. We saw two other cobia doing the same thing later that day.
I spoke with Capt. Tom Rinehart of Apollo Beach later that afternoon, and he said he found some redfish on that same flat, but didn't see any cobia.
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