Fort Myers to Boca Grande fishing report for January 2012

We finally received some cold weather this winter. The mercury dipped into the high 20's for a couple of days in early January and the fish responded after a few days of hibernation. The fishing for redfish and flounder really improved with the cold snap. Redfish pushed up on the grass flats looking for food and the flounder moved into the deeper sloughs and potholes. Speckled trout fishing changed quite a bit but was still good when you could find fish. The sheephead bite has also turned on and I even went out and caught a few last week. After the cold snap I ditched my artificial lures and fished with fresh shrimp. We caught limits of speckled trout and redfish. The flounder bite was really good also. The first warm day after the front pruduced 15 keeper sized flounder. That's a lot of flounder for our area since Southwest Florida is not known for its flounder fishing. Last week's weather was quite a bit warmer and we had to adapt to the changing conditions. The redfish scattered out on the flats and sighting was the most productive method. The redfish were "tailing" as pushed up onto the higher flats and we cast live shrimp to them and caught a dozen with four or five of them going over 10 pounds. The speckled trout were still hiding in the rooler moss and they responded weel to a variety of soft plastic lures. A few flounder were also caught while targeting the speckled trout.