Tampa Bay, Tarpon Springs, Clearwater & St. Petersburg

They can hear you breathe   I'm on a real kick lately to just fish every square inch of water I can. I have just decided that I'm going to check out all the areas that I have always passed up on in the past. This morning I had a few ideas of where I wanted to go in the Tarpon Springs area and I waited for the last half of the incoming tide to go. When I say that I'm fishing areas I've never fished before, we're not talking about completely new zip codes. We're talking about places within a stones throw of all my usual haunts.   As I passed by one of my favorite spots I noticed there was a boat working the area. It didn't bother me, he can have the spot today. I shut down about 1/4 mile North of him and began working an area that I had never fished in my life. I've probably fished near this little bay 100+ times in the past without ever actually going into it.   It didn't take five minutes to push a school of about 12 fish. The cool thing is they were bigger fish than the ones I've been catching the past 2 weeks. These were all upper to over slot fish. The bad news is I swear they could hear me breathing.  They were so spooky that the shadow from the flight path of the lure was spooking them. I had no trolling motor on, I wasn't knocking things around in the boat, and in fact I wasn't actually breathing. I know that sounds weird but when I find good fish I have to remind my self to breathe. So, I guess they couldn't hear me breathing after all. Maybe they could feel my pulse transferring through the boat to the water.   I set myself up where I could drift down the shoreline of this little bay and I saw tons of larger redfish. Not one would take my offering of a Gulp Shrimp. This is not to say I didn't catch any fish. The smaller ones were much less shy and actually wanted the bait to be worked really fast and erratic. I ended up landing 6 reds from 14"-24" but failed to hook up with one of the big boys, despite their abundance. I've got a charter on Wednesday in Tarpon Springs so check back after that and I'll let you know if they'll eat cut or live pinfish. I'm betting that they will.   By the way, the bay I found these fish in was very shallow. The entire bay averaged 1.5 feet deep on a +2.6 high tide. I never could figure out what the big boys wanted to eat but the little guys wanted a Gulp Shrimp on a weightless, weedless, hook, worked pretty fast with erratic twitching. Though there were a lot of fish, most were not bunched up tight. They were mostly milling around with the mullet. If you find a school of milling mullet (not cruising mullet), fish them. The reds are in every school of mullet I've seen lately.