    
Capt. John Sackett
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Votes: 0 | | Posted on Sunday, May 20, 2001 - 6:30 pm: | |
Subject: The latest action from www.AnglingAdventure.com
Busy… Best describes the fishing along the Gulfcoast!
Well, with weeks and weeks having passed since my last report, I’m hardly going to scratch the surface here on all the action my partners and I are enjoying right now, but I’ll try and do my best anyway!
Where do I start?
First, I’ll recap a little of the action that I’ve personally enjoyed with clients over the last couple of weeks, and then I’ll go on to talk about the action some of my partners have reported to me as well. Recent highlights aboard both my 21 foot Hydra-Sports and my 34 foot Baja have all involved “silver”. You know, either “silver kings”, or “kings of silver”. Both have required some work on occasion, but both are paying pretty big dividends for those that are pursuing them.
Case in point, last Monday I had the opportunity to fish for the first time with Paul Bishop who traveled with his wife and little one down from Tennessee. Now Paul is an experienced angler and he seemed to take in stride the fact that we watched 5 other boat hook tarpon right around us up inside Tampa Bay, but I wanted to hook him up in the worst way. Well, try as we might the bay itself produced very little, and even after burning a half a tank of gas hunting the big sand flats off the beach…. Zip! We’re talking nothing but a half dozen or so Spanish mackerel that swiped baits intended for larger targets. It was a great day, we saw a ton of wildlife and I was in great company, but somehow we just never got him his tarpon shot. Hopefully my day with him on Wednesday would be different. It was! Back into Tampa Bay we went, we anchored up, and we waited, well sort of. You see the tarpon had no intentions of keeping us waiting long and the threadfin on the end of Paul’s 8 foot Crowder rod got snarfed! The fish behaved well and swam clear of the structure all around us, but it only gave us one decent look at it as it greyhounded clear of the water at a high rate of speed. Based on the big white belly we saw hanging beneath it, I congratulated Paul on hooking into his first triple digit fish on light tackle. Talk about an understatement… At just under an hour into this epic battle, Paul’s big fish finally decided to give us a better look at it. First it gave us a violent head shake right on the surface, and then all of a sudden in an effort to rid itself of that annoying little Owner hook, it gave us two huge jumps with the first being a perfect cartwheel. Paul new it was a good fish, but I think that in addition to the torture test he was giving that Crowder rod, it was the look on my face when I finally got a good look at his fish that gave him a clearer indication of just how special this fish was. This wasn’t much like the bass fishing he does back home, but he handled the rod like a pro, and when I finally leadered the fish nearly two hours later, Paul got to enjoy a good look at a fish that wasn’t too far shy of two hundred pounds! That fish was probably 16-18 inches across his back alone, and undoubtedly the biggest one I’ve landed in the last four years. Add to his incredible fight a couple hours of decent snook action, and you had the makings of an awesome day on the water. Congratulations Paul!
Now the question for Friday’s trip with Steve Fortried be as productive? I could only hope. Fortunately for Steve the record went something like, first bait cast, Spanish mackerel caught, second bait cast, slam, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, kersplash, kersplash again. Oh yeah, hooked up and off to the races on the second bait! To make a two hour story relatively short, the drag on my big Okuma reel sang as sweet as could be for 120 minutes and Steve had the ride of his life while he tired what turned out to be a hundred fifty pound class fish. It was the second fish of the week that actually turned out to be a three county fish! Both Steve and Paul hooked up on big fish in Manatee County and got dragged clear across Hillsborough County, and all the way into Pinellas County. Sure, Hillsborough is pretty narrow in that part of Tampa Bay, but a three county fish is pretty cool anyway! At that point in the morning, it was decided Steve needed a bit of a break so we headed off toward the big sand flats just to see what we could see. Well, wouldn’t you know it, we didn’t find a single school of the jacks I was expecting, we found more tarpon. Fortunately for Steve, the next couple of fish hooked were impressive, but neither stayed on long enough to exaggerate the soreness he would feel for the next couple of days.
Okay, enough about the silver kings, let’s touch on the kings of silver… Saturday, I finally had the opportunity to stretch the 250 Mercs on my Baja, and it was well worth it. Well, sort of. You see I was booked with back to back six hour trips Saturday, the first of which was with a great bunch of folks from P.B.O.A. and some of the agents they work with. To say that we had a tough trip would be an extreme understatement! I could buy a fish out there! We ran North from our start in Sarasota to a wreck that has been red hot with sharks, spanish mackerel, cobia, and best of all jewfish. You see they were competing with other boats for most fish (the spanish would be perfect), and biggest fish (the jewfish would fit the bill here), but I’m reasonably sure that “least” fish was the only thing we were in the running for. Well, unless they counted the bait we sabiki rigged as the “smallest” that is. Anyway, I know I can’t control the fish, but I apologized nonetheless for our poor showing. So there I am preparing for my second trip of the day and thinking that I needed to do something radically different for my afternoon run, then I thought, no, stick with what you know works. Well, 30 minutes of slow trolling with a spread consisting of a shiner on one rod, a big threadfin on the flatline clip, and a jumbo blue runner trailing the downrigger, finally produced my clients first decent fish of the day. At the time, we just didn’t realize how decent. All four of the guys I had aboard took their turns on what turned out to be one heck of a challenge on a light kingfish sized tackle. Better than an hour later we were taking pictures of a beautiful blacktip shark that probably fell into the 80 plus pound bracket as I popped the leader and set him free. Time to get back to basics, I dropped the anchor on some inviting looking bait holding tight to the bottom and I dropped the chumbag back into the water. 20 minutes passed with relative little activity, but then thing finally started to happen they way they were supposed to. First a couple of missed hits, then a couple of the long shanked hook rigs got cut off clean. Sure enough, those weren’t spanish macks feeding, those were undoubtedly the kingfish that we had been hoping for. Out came the wire leader and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz we were hooking up solid. For the next couple of hours every bait we threw got slammed. No, we didn’t catch them all. We still managed a few cut offs and more than a few missed on the single hook rigs we were casting, but the fun we had was beyond description. When you get a good kingfish bite going on snook sized tackle, you are in for a lot of fun. Rig your anchor to a float to assist in quick get aways when a big fish threatens to spool you, but even with the Okuma Epix reels we were using, we managed kings all the way to twenty pounds on Saturday without once throwing the anchorline once. Sure, it got a little stressful and we got a little nervous a couple of times, but then again that’s a good kind of stress to have, I promise!
My partners are busy too…
Last week the results from my partners were probably even better than my own. Just about everything that could be caught, got caught. Sure there were tough days too here and there, but for the most part, now is definitely the time to plan on getting out there!
Capt. Steve Barron out of Palmetto had an awesome week once again that included things like 39 inch snook, and more than a few permit, but one his more memorable days was certainly last Monday when he fished for the first time with Pat Archer and his wife who traveled here all the way from New Mexico. Now while they might not have had a ton of experience dealing with fish like the perms and snook Steve put them on, I’m relatively sure that the three or more tarpon they hooked into were well beyond anything they had expected! It was great day, but the sight of tarpon doing cartwheels ten feet in the air, and the feeling of pressure they apply on the other end of your line, are things that I’m fairly sure Pat will never forget. Anyday that you do battle with tarpon and permit in the same day, is probably my idea of the ultimate gulfcoast fishing day.
Capt. Brian Kisluk of Bradenton was also out on the hunt for tarpon this week, but it was really easy to be on of the unlucky ones (see my first day with Paul Bishop above), and not get hooked up with one of the big boys. In Brian’s case though, his thorough knowledge of our area waters was instrumental in insuring his clients success. You see while Paul and I never really did get the action going strong the day the tarpon were ignoring us, Capt. Brian put his floks onto a “grand slam” that consisted of redfish, trout and snook. I know that’s a “flats” slam and not a “grand” slam right? After all, it takes a fourth species to make a slam truly “grand”. Well, in Brian’s case you can take you pick on a fourth species since thy also caught jack crevalle, flounder, spanish mackerel and even ladyfish that day.
Capt. Jason Ramsey of Palmetto was busy with his normal routine of tarpon hunt mornings, followed by snook style afternoons, with a couple notable exceptions. Exception number one, a tarpon less morning on the big structure in Tampa Bay lead him to explore an area on one of his favorite flats where he had seen a few tarpon rolling the day before. As he put it, “Wow, what a great call that was”! When I asked him if he had seen the fish rolling again, he said, “they didn’t have time to”. It was another of those first cast, slam, kind of things. You gotta love it when that happens! Two really unique things about this tarpon though were both it’s determination, and it’s size. Not only did this fish do the three county thing like the one above, but three hours and 10 minutes after the battle began, Jason carefully slipped his lipgaff into the fish’s mouth and started to lift. So far so good, then the tremendous weight of the huge tarpon straightened the hook! It was an incredible battle with a tremendous adversary on 30 pound spinning tackle. Exception to the norm number two, the very same clients (Ward Simpson and his sons) that endured the aforementioned tarpon, were out with Jason hoping to hook into another silver king, but the fish were less co-operative, so plan two was put into effect. Plan two, in this case involved taking advantage of the calm conditions and running a few miles out into the Gulf to one of Jason’s favorite wrecks. Some shiners were tossed out over the wreck and the results were almost instantaneous. The scorecard was impressive with a pile of spanish mackerel landed, then 4 or 5 really nice sharks and 3 keeper sized cobia were caught and released. So far so good, but as they battled yet another fish boatside, a huge swirl erupted on the water’s surface when a huge jewfish came up and inhaled the unsuspecting “bait”. Now jewfish encounters are fairly frequent on this particular wreck and Jason has battled many unsuccessfully on conventional tackle all the way up to hundred pound test, but this fish just ate a fish being played on a 30 pound tarpon size spinning rig. No chance landing this one, or so everyone thought. Well, Ward’s son stayed patient and somehow the fish stayed out of the wreck and believe it or not some 45-50 minutes later he had the beast boatside! Needless to say, this wasn’t the longest battle of our week, but it still deserves “catch of the week” honors. Drop me an e-mail titled “catch of the week” and I’ll return a photo of fish that you won’t soon forget.
A little further south of here, things are equally hot. The Boca Grande are is of course world famous for it’s tarpon, the sharks that eat those tarpon, and almost as much so for the incredible amount of pristine backcountry adjacent to it. Capt. Mike Wise lives right in the heart of that area and is showing clients almost every aspect of it on a regular basis. Whether you choose to fish “the pass” for GIANTS and experience that area as most do, or you set aside some time to have Mike show you some incredibly huge snook, or numerous redfish and trout, it’s just a flat awesome time to be down there. Fishing from a boat like Mike’s 20 foot Lake & Bay is an incredible experience from one end of the bay to the other. The trickiest part of hooking up down there is probably getting a date with a first rate guide, so you’ll want to call or e-mail Mike soon!
Get in touch with us soon!
Well, I hope that gives you some idea of the world-class action we’ve got going on right now. If you’d like to book a trip that you’ll not soon forget come and visit my website http://www.AnglingAdventure.com and we’ll get you hooked-up! Either way, we’ll be out there to let you know what’s going on.
Like my friend Capt. Mark always said,
Catch ‘em up!
Capt. John Sackett
(941) 920-4891
(877) 269-FISH (3474) Toll Free |
