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| | | By MICHAEL "SnookMook" WILSON, Lakeland Ledger |  | |
|  | | Well I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, sheepshead are a dental hygienist’s nightmare. Take a look at this old warhorse of a sheepie, I recently caught at Redfish Pass on Captiva Island. This fish fought hard and took me to structure like a seasoned old “convict fish,” as the old timers call them. It measured just under 18 inches. If you look closely it appears to only have one upper, incisor tooth. Yes, I did say incisor tooth. These fish have incisors and molars just like humans, believe it or not. This old fish actually fell for a bait I’ve learned over the years is highly successful at getting them to bite. More | | | | | | 6 to 9 AM this morning on the 970-WFLA Capt. Mel Show!
Lots of open calling as well as including the former outdoors writer for the Sarasota
Herald Tribune, Steve Gibson - plus lots of your comments and questions. | TV's "Average Angler" at next "Fishing Conversation" Nov. 10th | More fishing reports and articles: | | | Skipping lures: It catches fish! If you enjoy fishing mangrove edges, docks or other structures, here's a technique that you might want to add to your fishing resume. Once mastered, this method can improve your fish-catching ability. Once you learn how to skip baits, you will be able to get them all the way back to where the snook lives. The late Merrill 'Canoeman' Chandler, who was our "Master Skipper," told us exactly how to do it in one of his informative articles. | | | November: Weather cool-down lights up fishing There will be a lot of action this month on shallow and deep grass flats and in the coastal gulf. Snook will make their way towards backcountry areas, staging along sandbars as they go. Reds and trout will spend more time feeding on shallow flats as water temperatures cool. In the coastal gulf, Spanish and king mackerel, little tunny and cobia will follow bait schools south as the gulf water also cools. | | Tasty sheepshead coming with fall weather There are not a lot of fish left that people pursue strictly to hook and cook or catch and release into hot grease, as the net fishers used to say. But the sheepshead is one. It is a species still abundant enough to allow a liberal harvest of 15 per day, wonderfully tasty and reasonably easy to catch most of the time. With the first cool spells of fall, sheepshead by the hundreds move into dredged canals, particularly those with rocky bottoms. | Capt. Bill Miller Joins Capt. Mel kicking off a new series of "Fishing
Conversations" at Gator Ford Nov. 19th | | Don’t be afraid to ask! There he was sitting right next to me, using the identical lure with virtually the same kind of fishing outfit, reeling in one fish right after another. And me? I was catching nothing – nada! It really is frustrating and incomprehensible. How in the heck does he do that? I’m sure, at one time or another, you’ve been confronted with the same situation. Why does your fishing partner seem to have “the touch” while you have “hands of stone?” “How are you working that,” I blurted out. “I thought you had to work the DOA Shrimp slowly across the bottom.” | | Of red hooks and rattling lures I don’t know who did this first. But Virgil wrote of the brothers Remus and Romulus fishing for trout in the hills of Rome with “bits of colored yarn.” The poet was ill quite often, and his father was blind; the Aeneid was written more than 2,000 years ago. But someone must have told Virgil that trout ate colored yarn. Despite what science tries to tell us, we’ve been adding colors to fishing lures for at least that long. Most biologists don’t believe or aren’t sure that fish can see colors. Yet Dr. Eugenie Clark proved that lemon sharks can distinguish certain shade... | | | To Be a Woman and a Guide Over the last decade, there has been a notable increase in women anglers. A sport that heretofore appeared to be a men-only club is now populated with a growing number of female fishing enthusiasts. Many are quite talented and can often fish rings around their male counterparts. Yet, when it comes to fishing guides, the ratio of women to men is surprisingly small. What are some of the limiting factors for the distaff side? Why is it so few have taken up this profession, while the ranks of male guides have increased at a good pace? For some answers, we spoke with Capt. Rachel Cato who, a few years ago, made the life-changing decision -- becoming a full time guide. | | New rules will help to protect Florida's sea grass Rules outlining a series of escalating fines for damaging grass flats in state preserves are about to be enforced, and they are likely to considerably change the way many of us run the flats in some 2 million acres of inshore waters. Under the new regulations, anyone caught running over a grass bed within a preserve where the prop makes contact with the grass, can be fined $50 for a first offense, $250 for a second offense within 12 months, $500 for a third offense and $1,000 for a fourth within 72 months. All offenses are non-criminal. The preserves cover most of the best inshore fishing waters in the southern two-thirds of the state.... | | | The Learning Experience Many professed fishing enthusiasts spend all of their available time wetting a line, trying to hook that big lunker -- or in most cases, attempting to hook just about anything that will pull back on the other end of the line. But do we practice the angling art by rote? Or do we head out viewing each trip as a valuable learning experience, with the intent of picking up some small nuggets of information that will improve our skills? | | Never go wrong fishing in Key West Key West - Most people I know who visit Key West go to check out the funky shops and bars on Duval Street and hang out at sunset to see the street performers at Mallory Square, but I go for the fishing. I can honestly say I've never had a bad fishing trip here. Offshore, I've caught blackfin tunas, kingfish and the biggest yellowtail snappers — up to 26 inches — I've ever seen. Inshore, I've caught Spanish mackerel until I got tired of casting... | | | Federal managers shut down another Gulf fishery CORPUS CHRISTI, TX- The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) continued its bizarre history of biased management regarding Gulf amberjack when it announced this week that the recreational season for the popular offshore species will close on October 24 due to the recreational sector overfishing its quota. This announcement comes barely two years after the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council arbitrarily shifted a significant portion of recreational allocation to the commercial sector. | | So, you think fishing is an obsession? Been thinking about the whole modern cultural phenomenon of cell phones that has morphed into an environment of never-ending texting and twittering. Believe it or not, a charter trip a couple of weeks back helped accentuate the depth of the communications sensation that is evident in every corner of our world these days. It seemingly, was to be an easy trip, a father and his teen son, just home from college. A chance for Dad to get away with his boy for some fun and good communication, as “Dad” told me when he booked the trip. | | | “How do you get a job like Capt. Mel’s?” July marked my 25th anniversary with 970-WFLA. It all started in the 1980s when then sports talk host Tedd Webb asked me to do a weekly Friday evening fishing report for his popular “Sports Huddle.” Not only was it a blast teaming up with the zany Tedd, but it provided an opportunity for me to get back into my life-long profession of broadcasting. The Friday reports led to more appearances with Tedd on the “Sports Huddle” and three years later, Jed DuVall, 970-WFLA program director at that time, approached me to do a Saturday morning fishing show. | | State fish-cleaning proposals foolish In following the controversy over fish-cleaning stations, some issues bear scrutiny. Spurred by pending new state rules, the county learned it had no permits for such stations, old or new. That led to the removal of these boat ramp necessities. It would be easy to blame the county parks and recreation or natural resources departments for such a mistake. It’s the job of these people to make sure the county has the appropriate permits; hence the job of county commissioners to insure that bureaucrats perform. |
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