March Fishing with Vance

Fished with Vance this weekend on some low incoming tide conditions on the South Shore of Tampa Bay.  Weatherman called for light winds and light chop so we hit the water early from EG Simmons and ran south towards CRB.  We jumped onto the flat earlier than I thought we might to maximize our time on the water and found fish right away.  The morning was a little cool after this recent cold snap and it took a few missed fish for us to figure out the slow bite.  You really had to be patient and let the fish eat before setting the hook but it wasn't long before we brought a couple of nice reds to the boat. 

The water continued to warm and we continued to pull in some nice reds from the holes so we worked a little closer to the sandbar back into some deeper incoming water to hopefully catch a bigger red and all we ended up with was this guy!

This is one SLOB of a trout and it was longer than the redfish I had put in the boat!

Of course he ended up catching another big trout and we both caught a couple more reds on a deep hole off the sandbar.  Needless to say I will be marking those couple of hole on the GPS as they had some cuts from bar dumping in there so they weren't unlike most trout streams I fish in the North Georgia mountains.  Well the tide was rising quickly so I thought it would be a good time to head to Schuster's Hole as the fish should be pushing off of the flats up into the mangroves.  So we put down the trolling motor and head in.  We already were having a good day and ended up finding the hole untouched with the perfect wind to fish the area.

Well first couple of casts in and missed strikes but it didn't take long to find some fishing willing to eat the entire shrimp. 

We fished this hole for the rest of the incoming tide.  We would catch a couple of fish and push the mullet off and not get bit for a little while and then when they came back we would catch a couple more.  We had a couple of doubles and some nice reds. 

We finished up on the last shrimp with this solid fish as the tide was quickly coming to end and then we tried with some artificials but with no luck.  We put down the big motor and headed back to the ramp to load up and clean some fish for dinner.