Outdoors

Daily fishing report

By DAVE ZALEWSKI
Published April 20, 2005

High winds and rough seas kept us in port most of last week and through the weekend. Monday's weather report calling for decreasing winds from the east gave us a ray of hope for fishable seas, tempered with the expectation of finding dirty, churned up water - not the best condition for trolling. It was not until we were approaching the Madeira Beach artificial that the water began to clear up.

No bait was evident on the surface and the depth finder only revealed small pods here and there. So we decided to troll planers and spoons to cover more territory. A nice Spanish mackerel was on the rod with a No. 1 planer separated from a No. 1 gold spoon by 30 feet of 30-pound test leader before the second rod with a No. 2 planer and a larger spoon could be used. Undersize (less than 24 inch) kingfish became a nuisance and we left for the South County reef.

The mooring ball which was east of the reef marker and marked the sunken tug "Orange" is missing, but its location was evident by the large stack of bait which was over it and visible both from the surface and on the depth finder. Because hardware worked so well at the first stop, we continued, trolling over structure scattered at the site. Small kingfish were also a problem here, but there were enough larger ones to allow us to catch our limit of two per person along with mackerel and blue runners. The blue runners were kept alive in the bait well and were later slow trolled with stinger rigs. The runners produced a bonus of three large barracuda which were caught, photographed and released.

- Dave Zalewski charters the Lucky Too out of Madeira Beach and can be reached at 727 397-8815 or by e-mail at Luckytoo2@aol.com

[Last modified April 20, 2005, 10:39:01]