Marco Island, Ft. Myers & Boca Grande

Fishing is excellent for snook and redfish! Good fishing still continues out of Marco Island. Huge snook, oversized redfish, acres of mackerel, bluefish and jack crevelle provided excellent action this week. Large sardines have been the key to the good fishing. I fished out of Everglades National Park once last week with flies and artificial lures and the bite was extremely tough. We have been catching good numbers of snook on every trip since Thanksgiving Day. The snook are getting bigger each day also. October produced lots of undersized snook and November produced medium sized snook but December has produced some of the largest snook of the year. Customer Mike Muscatello and I got three snook between 38-40 inches and one 31-inch fish using live sardines fished around mullet schools in the 10,000 Islands. We also picked up two oversized redfish and a couple of nice slot sized reds about 6-7 pounds each. We also landed about six or seven smaller snook and a couple of them were keepers also. I have found that the larger snook are still on the outside and the farther you go in the backcountry the snook seem to be getting smaller. Like I mentioned earlier, the redfish have made a good showing last week. We caught a least one redfish on each trip last week and most of them were too big to keep. Free-lined 4-5 inch sardines have been the bait of choice for all the fish that we are targeting. When fishing shallow water I have been floating the baits over the grass and rocks with a popping cork. Spanish mackerel are still migrating off the coast of Southwest Florida. We have been catching as many as want everyday. The spanish mackerel are running 18-22 inches and are hitting flies, spoons, jigs and live sardines. Look for gulls, which will follow the spanish and wait for them to push the baitfish to the surface. Bluefish are also around structure just offshore of Marco Island. They have been taking cutbait and live sardines in 18-20 feet of water. The blues aren’t as big as the East Coast blues but most are over 20 inches. Catch and release trout fishing picked up while we were snook fishing with a few catches of fish over 20 inches. We caught the trout using 5-inch sardines for snook but smaller shiners would probably catch a bunch more. Other notable catches this were plenty of jack crevelle and large ladyfish. The tarpon and king mackerel are around but the kings probably ate best at night with the full moon and the tarpon are in the major passes south of Marco Island and out of Chokoluskee. The fishing should remain good as long as we don’t get any hard cold fronts. High winds are forecast for next weekend and that could slow fishing because of muddy water on the outside. Maybe we’ll get lucky! Good Luck! Capt. Scott Hughes Blackwater Charters 863-946-9171