Summertime Is Here
School is out and the summer has begun. We've been doing a little bit of everything the last few weeks. Inshore, Offshore, and some Bowfishing, it's been nonstop action for Captain Shane lately. The big obstacle this time of year are the thunder storms. Avoiding getting wet and not to mention struck by lightning has been our biggest concern.
Most customers are looking to get fish to eat. Inshore fishing trips are a little difficult to get table fair during the summertime. Snook season closed June 1st until September 1st, redfish is closed, and the trout are usually full of worms with the warmer water. The inshore bite has been pretty good though, we've found a few spots in the river to bring home some keeper mangrove snapper and sheepshead. The snook, redfish, and trout have been pretty consistent up along the mangrove shorelines and around the spoil islands, but you got to have patience to get the hit. The snook at the inlet has been hit or miss the last few weeks. The big schools of goliath grouper are now here so that normally slows the snook bite down quite a bit at the jetty. Also, the sargassum seaweed has been horrible all along the beach and in the inlet making it very hard to fish. If it's nice enough in the ocean, we can get out to some of the closer reefs on nearshore trips to catch lane snapper.
If table fair or filling the cooler is what your looking for then offshore trips are where it's at. Offshore bottom fishing has been on fire the last couple weeks. The snapper bite has been amazing. Once you get on the spot it doesn't take much time at all to limit out on snapper. We've been catching lots of lane snapper and mangrove snapper with live shrimp, threadfin herring, and grunts. We've also been catching triggerfish, toro snapper, and cobia. That's one of the cool things about bottom fishing in the ocean is you never really know what your gonna pull up. The sargassum seaweed has been scattered all over the ocean making it almost impossible to troll.
Bowfishing tilapia has been excellent. The water is still very low in our usual spots so we've moved on to the bigger lake areas. The lakes have been very succesfull along the shorelines, we've been shooting some giant blue tilapia. That's what makes bowfishing so fun is there's really no shortage in fish to shoot. The whole time it's constant action.
They've opened up our East Coast Red Snapper season. We get a whopping 2 days to harvest red snapper, July 14th and 15th. Depending on weather conditions, we're gonna try to run three 5hr trips on those days.
