This past week I divided my time fishing a night charter early in the week, then a daytime trip out of Flamingo. The night trip was on a short tide, with the low slack tide only three hours after our start. We found modest numbers of small tarpon at bridges and docklights, jumping six fish on flies and lures, with two of them all the way to the boat.. Here's a photo of T.J. Schulz with his first tarpon on fly, hooked up and running... [img][img]
Both of the ones we hooked on fly made it to the skiff, the ones on light spinning gear just took my anglers to school... I think they'll be back.
A few days later we did a special trip back down to Flamingo. My angler that day was my wife... Her first trip there was over 30 years ago and we've been together since then. Our schedules usually run in different directions so we rarely fish together in recent years. She hasn't lost her touch...
Our target this day was fish for the table and it was a good trip. Her first snook of the day was right at 9lbs. Here's a photo... [img][img]
We went on to catch lots of speckled trout along the coast and hook one or two "un-stoppables" along the way. The trout were concentrated in river mouths, bright silver- just in from the Gulf, and very hungry. At one spot there were so many that it was a fish every cast. We left them biting.
We found lots and lots of bait everywhere, whitebait, small herring, large bay anchovies, and schools of mullet. Wherever the mullet were there were large tarpon... as a matter of fact there were numbers of big tarpon almost everywhere we went. They should be around at least another week until we finally get a cold enough night to push them back out into the Gulf.
We ended the day with a nice 20" red - just right for the table. [img][img]
