by Capt. Billy Norris
Few places on earth offer the caliber of fishing that we have available to us here in Southwest Florida. As we move out of winter, we are coming into one of the best times of year to get out on the water and catch some quality fish and fishing this past month has been excellent! Even though we have been plagued with more days of high winds and seas this year, we have still been putting plenty of big fish in the boat. Offshore and backwater have been stellar, and will only continue to get better as we move into our springtime fishing pattern.
The backwater bite has been great. The big 3; snook, redfish, and tarpon, have all been active as the water temperature starts to slowly creep up. Over the course of the past month, the Gulf temperature has hovered right around 70 degrees, causing fish to not be as lethargic in the backwaters. As far as bait of choice in the backwater, live pilchards or threadfins are the way to go. As the fish become more active, they will be less inclined to take slow moving baits like shrimp over a rapidly moving offering like a live whitebait. There have also been large schools of pompano around on the flats as well as in the deeper cuts. Target them with pompano jigs or a shrimp tipped jig for best results. As is typical for this time of year, there have been plenty of sharks in the backwaters if you feel like hearing your drag scream.
Offshore has been on fire! The kingfish finally showed up, a few months late this year, and we have been catching some beautiful kings.
With the kingfish, come the sharks and they are big sharks! Over the past month we have landed multiple sandbar, bull and lemon sharks over 7 foot long. In addition, we scored some big tigers and hammerheads. The snook bite nearshore has been the best I’ve seen in years! The 28-33 inch slot window is incredibly tight, but we have been catching a bunch of them in the slot this past month. Usually, we get a bunch that are over-slot, and a million that are under, but for whatever reason the keeper sized fish have been plentiful this year.
Cobia have also been fired up this last month and targeting them on both wrecks and reefs, we took home a lot of nice “brown clowns” this month. Cobia will eat basically anything, but they do have their preferred baits of choice. Hard to beat a nice big piece of cobia for dinner!
Overall, the fishing has been great this past month. I expect that it will continue to get better and better as we move into spring. Over the course of this month, Pale Horse Fishing Charters will be running trips out of Big Pine, in the Florida Keys for tarpon. Come on down and come out with us and see how we do it!