Last Updated on March 8, 2010 by Capt. Jason
Finally! Some warm weather today for fishing charters in the Tarpon Springs area! And, the best news is that the weather is forecasted to be warm for the foreseeable future. Not to say that we won’t see any more cold fronts at all but the prospects of 70+ degree days for the next week or more is great news. Even better is that the fish love the warm weather too!
Today I had Joe and Pearl on the boat. They had scheduled a trip with me last year and ended up having to leave town early before we could get out and fish. This year though, we were able to go and it was a good thing that we were. The day started out slow as the tide didn’t move much until around 10:30am but once it did, we were able to pick up a few nice trout and a couple of really nice sheephead in the Palm Harbor area. Our next move was to the Spoil Island in St. Joseph sound so that we could hammer the trout on the incoming tide. Fishermen were ready, as there were 5-7 boats on each island, but the fish weren’t. I only saw one trout landed while we were out there.
So, we headed to a spot that the trout seem to hang out at when they aren’t at the islands and sure enough, they were there sunning themselves in shallow water. There must have been at least 150 large trout on the flat and we were excited to see that they were willing to eat. We had about 2 dozen shrimp left at this point and we ended using them all on the nice 18-24″ trout.
Trout in the Clearwater, Palm Harbor and Tarpon Springs areas really like the incoming tide this time of year. So if trout is your main target, I would plan your trip around being able to hit your spots around the incoming tide. If you visit the spoil islands and the fish aren’t there, head to shallow water. They seem to wait for water temps to hit 60 degrees before they hit the spoil islands and today was no different. The water temp never got above 58 degrees and those big trout were happy to be sunning themselves in less than two feet of water.
Look for water temps to continue to rise this week but not as fast as it did today. The cloud cover we will have for the next 4 days will slow to water temperature rise but the fishing should still get better with each degree that the water temp ticks up. Redfish are around in good numbers but we didn’t have high enough water today to chase them. Tides next week should be favorable for being able to put more redfish in the boat.