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Key To Catching Snook Is Sardines

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 20, 2008

Updated: 02/18/2008 08:33 pm

Winter continued its warmer than usual trend last week with water temperature up to 69 degrees. That means snook should start feeding.

Capt. Danny Guarino said he found plenty of bait at the Sunshine Skyway, but it was deep. He said he caught trout and snook, with three of the snook in the slot. He also fished the Fort De Soto Park area and caught a little bit of everything, including bluefish, flounder, mangrove snapper and ladyfish.

It's still catch-and-release on snook until March 1. This year, February was added to further reduce the snook catch.

For all of the hoopla about the difficulty of catching snook, the riddle is easily solved with a live well full of scaled sardines. As a predator that has evolved to pick off the weak and the infirm, a handful of injured sardines are practically irresistible to small snook.

Once they get to slot size - 28 to 33 inches on this coast - they know what a hook and leader look like and become harder to catch. Unfortunately, few snook survive to reach that size.

Fourteen years ago, most of the snook I caught were between 20 and 23 inches. Back then the limit was 2 fish and the minimum was 24 inches with no cap.

There were more fish then, and despite decreasing the limit to one fish and putting a 34-inch cap to top off the slot some years ago, snook numbers have continued to decline as angling pressure increased. I'm not sure what the answer is outside of making snook a catch-and-release only proposition.

One of my winter projects this year was to buy a canoe and rig it with a rowing platform. Used canoes are easy to find, and so was the rowing gear. I just Googled rowing canoe on my computer and found exactly what I wanted.

The package I selected consisted of two elbow-shaped aluminum brackets, a pair of oarlocks that bolted to the end of the elbow and a pair of aluminum paddles.

The brackets are mounted to a half-inch board the width of the canoe, and are attached to the gunwales via a couple of clamps.

My maiden voyage was not without incident, as I surprised a manatee in 3 feet of water by rowing over top of him. He didn't quite tip me over, but I do believe my heart skipped a couple of beats.

Fred Everson is a Ruskin fishing guide. Submit information and photographs by calling (813) 830-8890 or sending an e-mail to ihuntsnook@aol.com.

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