Manatee River, Tera Ceia Bay

April 28th, 2008 

Trout are coming back in Tampa bay!

The weather is starting to get back on track and fishing is right behind it! The cold front that came through the area last week was a pretty big one, not to mention very strange for this time of year. It dropped the water temperature roughly 10 degrees to 15 degrees in most of the shallow bays. The cold front, and in return the decreased water temperature, sure did make fishing tough. Although, it was tough, we still caught a mess of fish.

We caught some great redfish last week. Not only did we catch a bunch of them, we caught some huge ones. Some of them were easily pushing 35 inches, which by the way, is an awesome redfish. We also had a number of fish that were right at the slot, which isn’t too bad either. Two redfish enabled my team to win another redfish tournament! Both of the fish we weighed in were pushing the 27 inch limit, but the tournament is based on weight. We had a total of 16 pounds with our two fish. The redfish we caught last week were a bit different each day. Sometimes all the redfish we caught were to big and at other times all of them met the slot. Over the past few weeks, the fish have been on the move, and as the weather gets warmer, redfishing should just keep getting better and better.

We caught some great snook last week, and that’s not including one that got away. Overall, we caught some great fish. We had a few keeper fish that met the slot of 28 inches to 33 inches. The snook of the week was a 30 inch fish. The cold weather really didn’t change the snook bite. We were still able to get on a good snook bite.

We didn’t have a chance to do much tarpon fishing last week; however, I did have one of my regular customers fishing with me one day and we did hook and boat one tarpon. Take a look at the picture. We boated the 120 pound tarpon in roughly 15 minutes to 20 minutes. Not bad for a short day of tarpon fishing if I must say so myself.

I participated in a tournament for charity last Friday in Tampa, FL, and we caught some nice trout. We landed our fish in the north part of the bay. We took two big fish, with the first being 24 ½ inches and the second 25 ¼ inches, to the weigh in and won. We won both first and second place in the biggest trout division of the tournament with these great fish. Please visit http://castawaychartersinc.com/ and book your trip today!