Outdoors

Daily fishing report

By ROB GORTA
Published March 14, 2006

This is the best time of year to fish. The past two weeks have been as good as fishing gets. Higher tides earlier this month produced some of the best red fishing in years.

Patience paid off for Jim Levi and two friends one morning. Cloudy and windy conditions out of the southwest pushed more water into the bay. This made it difficult to locate fish. I push-poled my flats skiff for three hours trying to locate a school of reds.

Finally, a sign of red, the color of the water when a school of red fish is found. I worked slowly and positioned the boat as best as possible. The anchor was slipped very quietly over the stern.

Everyone kept calm and waited for me to tell them when to cast. A weighted cork over a small circle hook was needed for our small baits. I put a half-dozen scaled sardines into the chum bat and threw it as far as I could. One blowup. Two blowups. The redfish were going crazy over our live chum.

I filled the bat with as many sardines as it could handle and let it fly again. Redfish were busting up the chum like crazy. I yelled to everyone to cast. Levi and his friends had triple hooks for three hours. We headed in after catching more than 50 redfish.

That was a special day that does not happen very often. Patience and instinct were the keys to our unbelievable day of fishing.

--Rob Gorta charters out of St. Petersburg. Call him at 727 647-7606 or see www.captainrobgorta.com

[Last modified March 14, 2006, 00:55:10]