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Fish Early, Late To Avoid Heat

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 4, 2008

With water temperatures climbing and the longest days of the year ahead of us in the next few weeks, we will slide into summer fishing patterns. I start my trips earlier in the morning so I can end them before getting into the peak heat of midday or go much later in the afternoon.

If possible, I try to avoid being on the water between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. this time of year. I don't have any place on my boat to get out of the sun.

Summer fishing means some changes in tackle. As water temperature rises into the 80s, clarity lessens and weeds and algae become a concern. I start using more Texas-rigged jerk baits and fewer jigs and lures with treble hooks. This is also when I start fishing cut bait for redfish on the mangrove shoreline at high tide. And it can be brutal.

With threadfins all over the surface of the bay, they are the easiest bait to find - but getting them into a cast net is something else again. The eight-foot, three-eighth-inch net you use for pilchards on the flats will not do for the speedy threadfins in most cases. Here I like a 10-foot, half-inch net. It's the size of the mesh of the net that controls its sink rate, and threadfins in deep water can easily outrun a small mesh net. And as the summer progresses, they get pretty good at avoiding the half-inch net as well.

The nice thing about threadfins is that you don't need that many. They don't keep well anyway and if you overload your live well, they will all be dead in short order. I like to limit those I keep alive to two dozen, and then keep another two dozen on ice for cut bait. I cut the threads into half-inch steaks and fish them on jigs heads along the shadow line of the mangroves at high tide for redfish and the occasional snook.

The best tides to fish this week will be from the beginning of the fall in midafternoon until sunset. There will be a lot of current because of the new moon that occurs tonight. This should also make for hot fishing for mangrove snapper on deep-water structure. I am already seeing big schools of little snapper at the mouth of the Little Manatee River, which means the big fish have already moved on to deeper water. The limit on snapper is five fish with a 10-inch minimum, but I like them bigger than that if I'm going to take the trouble to clean them.

Fred Everson is a Ruskin fishing guide. All South Shore fishermen and guides may submit information and photographs to be included in this column by calling (813) 830-8890 or sending an e-mail to ihuntsnook@aol.com.

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