    
Capt. Mike Winn
Unregistered guest
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 | | Posted on Wednesday, November 27, 2002 - 1:01 am: | |
Subject: Big Bend Fishing Report
Big Bend
Happy Turkey day! Well I have got some good news and I've got some bad news. The good news is that grouper fishing is about as good as it gets, and inshore anglers are finding outstanding numbers of trout and redfish in rivers and creeks. And as you might have guessed, the bad new is that the weather looks pretty poor from turkey day through Sunday.
Rivers and creeks containing deep holes and warmer water are attracting trout, redfish, and anglers. Homosassa, Crystal River, Wacassassa, Cedar Key, and Suwannee are all producing good to excellent catches. Several baits are working well; live shrimp, Tiny Trout series Mirrolures, Saltwater Assassin jigs in white and pink, root beer, and electric chicken. Shallower waters are not out of the question. The combination of an incoming tide and a sunny day can warm mud and oyster flats enough to lure trout and reds to the skinny water later into the day.
Other inshore species you might encounter are sheepshead, black drum, sand trout, or whiting. Sand trout and whiting have been holding on hard packed sand bottom in channels or cuts from Cedar Key and Suwannee. Crystal River, Homosassa and Cedar Key anglers have found a few black drum mixed in with redfish.
WOW! What a stretch of great weather and even better grouper digging. Why can't it always be this good? Grouper catches are great all over. The powerful bottom dwellers seem to be congregating on rock piles from 20- to 50-feet deep. Several 20 fish limits have been taken without ever pulling anchor! We were not lucky enough to find that may keepers in one spot, but were able to fill limits moving only a couple of times. Pinfish did the trick for us, but many boats are cleaning up using only frozen herring or sardines. Pinfish are still abundant, and you can put 100 in the live well in short order. You may want to up your leader material size, as many of these gags are big, and my usual 80-lb leader failed on more than one occasion. The pressure these large fish can exert is amazing, and while they rarely "cut" through a leader, oversize grouper can actually flatten out the leader to the point of failure. Offshore waters are pretty dingy right now so the 100- to 125- pound leader should not affect the willingness of fish to bite.
Oversize reds are keeping grouper company over select hard-bottom areas offshore resulting in some exciting catch-n-release fishing. The only problem is I don't know why the big reds pick the areas they do, and they don't stay in one place for long.
Hopefully this weather forecast is wrong and conditions will improve somewhat so we can go work off some of this turkey by putting the hurt on some big fish.
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