Tampa Bay’s South Shore

July 16th 2008

After a week of heavy afternoon thunderstorms, it finally dried up on Thursday. Keli Emery and I decided to fish for tripletail and cobia, but first we had to catch some bait. She told me she had found it the weekend before out in front of the Cockroach Bay boat ramp. It was still there but, but the baits that were big enough to fish with were scarce, and mixed in with gillies. Two hours and a dozen tosses of the net, we barely had enough bait to fish with.

We headed out to the shipping channel on a fast falling tide. On our first stop of the day to wet a line, I kept the motor running while Keli pitched a bait under a buoy. She was instantly hooked up with a fat mangrove snapper, and there were a dozen other fish behind it. I quickly baited up and also hooked and landed a keeper. We took four or five fish off that can, and another two on the next. By then it was dead flat calm, so we ran all the way to the mouth of the Alafia River in search of a cobia, but we never saw the first fish. There were, however, great schools of big threadfin herring on every bit of structure around Beer Can Island and Bird Island.

The following day I fished with Tom White of Skipper's Smokehouse and we went after some pompano I'd heard about around the Skyway. We found those fish easily – Tom put a keeper in the boat with his first cast. We caught three more and then decided to try the mangrove snapper again in the middle of the bay. The tide was slack by the time we got there, and we only caught two fish that were probably just keepers, but Tom released them anyway. He and I think alike; cleaning fish smaller than 14 or 15 inches is not worth the effort.

I'm finally seeing schools of Spanish mackerel and some bait pods around the ship channels. They've been slow getting here, but it looks like the summer bite is in full swing.

Join me for a three hour course on fishing at Skipper's Smokehouse on Tuesday, August 12 at 7:00 pm. Cost is $25 and includes a signed copy of my latest book -- Fish the Flats.

To contact the captain phone him at 813 830 8890, or you can visit his website at http://tampabayfishingguide.com/ .