Tampa Bay, Tarpon Springs, Clearwater & St. Petersburg

All Day Action - Tarpon Springs It was Tom's Birthday (bottom left) and he and his buddies decided that they wanted to go do some fishing. So we set up an all day fishing charter out of Tarpon Springs. They were all from just outside of Orlando and we could have fished closer to their home but I told Tom that I was on some pretty good fish in Tarpon Springs and if he wanted to catch as many fish as possible, that would be the place to go right now. He was game.   So I picked up Tom and his buddies at 8am and we headed to Anclote Key to get some trout. I had bought a lot of shrimp and the plan was to try them fished under a pooping cork. We got a couple of trout but the pinfish chewed up nearly $40 worth of shrimp. So for revenge, I threw the cast net and loaded the well with pinfish.   The tide had finally come in enough for me to go hit some redfish spots in New Port Richey so with a full live well, off we went. It took me a little while to find some fish for these guys on the first stop but we finally did manage a couple of keepers. The tide was ripping in good and I had an idea the bite at another spot North of us should be going off. We headed up there and it wasn't long before we had our limit of redfish and a couple more keeper trout.   I lost track of how many fish we caught but it was a lot. The guys caught plenty of keeper redfish and trout and they fought some nice sized jacks for fun as well. The action was pretty steady all day long. The key again was pinfish fished under a cork. I probably won't buy shrimp again for a long time as our pinfish population is just out of control and they will just eat them all before a game fish gets to the bait. The highest concentration of fish were close to some oyster bars but on on the bars themselves. They seemed to be hanging 20-30 yards off of the bars in potholes.  We just had a cold front come through over the weekend so it will be interesting to see how that effects the fishing this week.