SW FL-Bonita Beach: brrrrrrrr but a few good catches

The cold temperatures of last weekend persisted into this week, but Alene Haug, her daughter, Emma, and family member, John, were brave enough to fish Estero Bay with me on a very cold, windy late morning trip on Tuesday, 1/5. We used live shrimp to catch and release one snook and two redfish, along with a couple dozen sheepshead. We caught a few keeper -sized mangrove snapper also.

My remaining scheduled trips for this week have rescheduled for hopefully warmer days. That being said, we are still lucky here in southwest Florida, compared with the weather reports from everywhere else in the country right now. Unfortunately the cold extremes caused a hefty fish-kill, which has now prompted stricter regulations in order to protect our local fisheries. For example, as a result, snook and tarpon season will remained closed through September.

After cancelling a week's worth of fishing trips during the windy, cold weather we have had, I finally made it offshore Wednesday morning, 1/13/10, with John & Karla Bolan, John's daughter, Alanna, and Caleb and Greg Robertson. It wasn't at all warm when we headed out but, compared with the deep freeze of the previous days, it almost seemed warm! We headed out nineteen miles from New Pass to fish with live shrimp in 43 feet, and had a productive morning. We caught eleven nice mangrove snapper to 17 inches, a 13-inch keeper lane snapper and a mess of grunts. The big prize went to Caleb, who caught a 22-inch keeper gag grouper (Caleb gave this prize to Karla to hold for the picture shown.). We released lots of smaller grouper and snapper.

Weather went downhill once again and I cancelled a few more trips for the rest of that week. This week is super-busy on the books but we’ll have to see how many trips weather will allow.