The Tampa Bay Times

Action has been good for more unusual targets.   Trout are pretty easy.  Throwing five inch soft plastics in the right spot, you can catch trout for hours on end.    Larger trout will become easier when things finally cool down, something that is under a month away now.   Juvenile bluefish have invaded the Bay.    We caught 40 in an hour in one location.   They were ten to eleven inches.   They have to be twelve.   You can keep ten per person.    Silver trout, ordinarily a dead of winter species have arrived early.   I use the pompano jig and teaser and just get it down to the bottom and if they’re there, you catch them one after another.     No regulations, I use them to make fish spread.   In the smoker for two hours, you can get a lot of meat for making fish spread with this species.   They are too small to really fillet but I dehead them, gut them and smoke them whole.   It is an easy process, pulling the skin and bones away from the meat.   These ones are great on ultralight tackle.    For a small fish, they provide some fun, but use your lightest rods and reels for silver trout.   Attempts for other species were not as successful.    Seasonal opportunities, if you can find them, big redfish are a possibility.   We simply didn’t get into them on our attempts.    Flounder just never became a great option this year.    Pompano have been a possibility but they were not caught in the locations they had been caught easily in years past.    Changes coming up should make everything better.    We have to get through a few more weeks of heat and then things should get really interesting.   

Neil Taylor
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