Stuart Area Inshore and Offshore

The final rainfall total from Fay was over twenty inches of rain for the Stuart area. Brown runoff water stretched for miles and still lingers in some parts of the ocean and the rivers. To add to our misery, The Army Corps of Engineers have opened the St. Lucie Locks and is dumping over a billion gallons a day of dirty, fresh, Lake O water into the St. Lucie River. The brown plume on the outgoing tide spreads for miles. Needless to say, the combination of these two events has had a profound effect on our fishing. We were out several days after Fay and felt lucky that we were able to find a few sardines. We were surprised by a great king bite in fifty to eight feet of water northeast of the inlet. It slowed considerably as the runoff kept coming and the live bait slowly disappeared. One needs to go out to three hundred feet and more to find blue water. We were out yesterday and the fishing was slow at the bridges and around the inlet. We were trying for snook but they were hard to find. We caught some ladyfish and a couple of snapper along with one small black tipped shark. There are some snook being caught near the spillways and up near the locks. A friend of mine managed to hook eleven the other day and one fish was forty two inches. He was using bombers. We had a nice snook trolling a bomber in one of the canals in North River Shores and some mangrove snapper on live shrimp in the same area. Hopefully Hurricane Ike stays far from us and lets our water recover from all the runoff. More later.