Manatee River, Tera Ceia Bay, Tampa Bay

August 12th, 2008

The bite is on in Tampa Bay!

Fishing has been awesome lately! We have had great numbers of fish and many different species, such as, snook, redfish, trout, mackerel, snapper, flounder, tarpon, and sharks. It’s no secret that the heat is sweltering, but it certainly hasn’t slowed us down one bit. We deal with it by fishing early in the morning and late in the afternoon when we can.

We caught many great redfish last week. Each day brought a different outcome. Some days all the fish were mostly over sized and other days the fish were all in the slot. The slot is the range that the redfish has to be in order to keep it, and currently that is 18 inches to 27 inches long. The redfish of the week was a 37 inch redfish. I even had to untie the anchor and chase this fish down. We hooked this bull red with 10 lb test, and before I knew it, the redfish had over 75 yards of line off the reel so I had to untie the anchor and chase it. What a great fight!

The snook we’ve been catching recently are mostly schoolies, ranging from 18 inches to 26 inches long. We did catch a few that were just out of this slot, but mostly the fish we caught were in this range. We did catch some great snook on the outgoing tides last week. It really didn’t matter what time of the day we were snook fishing as long as the tide was moving… it was fish on.

Most of the Tarpon we landed last week ranged from 20 lbs to 50 lbs. We caught some of the fish on light tackle, which was a lot of fun. There is still plenty of big fish around, but they are not biting very easily. Over the next few weeks that should change.

We mixed it up a bit last week and did some shark fishing and had pretty good results. We caught a few sharks that were pushing 4ft and the kids on the boat loved it. We also had three fish that took so much line off the reel before we could get the boat moving that it wasn’t even funny. There are definitely some big sharks in the Bay! Please visit www.castawaychartersinc.com and book your trip today!