Tampa Bay, Tarpon Springs, Clearwater & St. Petersburg

It's Not How You Start... ...it's how you finish! The trout bite has been really good lately and the average size fish has been fairly large. With this in mind, and knowing that we had a negative low tide in the morning in Tarpon Springs, I made plans to take Steve and Heidi to some troughs out by Anclote to get on some trout. There were fish there but we struggled for bites for a good 2.5 hours. I must have just missed the bite there or just missed the fish because I had a friend within earshot of us that limited out on big trout in 30 minutes. We did catch 4 or five but it was disappointing to compared to what has been going on for me out there.   I couldn't take the slow trout bite anymore so I told Steve and Heidi that we were going after some real game fish. So with a live well full of pinfish (and one keeper trout), we headed north. It took about 15 minutes to find my redfish. Only problem was that they didn't want to eat. the tide had just started to become slack and I was hoping the bite would kick in once it started ripping out. Once the tide started flowing, the bite still didn't turn on. We could see the fish, they just wouldn't eat. It was time to try some different presentations. We took the corks off and threw out tail hooked pinfish. That coaxed one bite but that was it. Then I lightened the leader to 20lb and started cutting pinfish in half. That was the ticket!   The bite lasted a solid 1.5-2 hours. the fish would never stop moving though. So after we'd hook up with one or two reds we'd have to move farther down the shoreline to keep up with the fish.  I lost track of how many redfish we caught but he was a few double hook-ups and even caught the too biggest trout of the day, on cut pinfish no less. That was a new one for me.   Anyway... the day started slow but finished with a bang. It's like I always say, "Inshore fishing is often hours of boredom interrupted by moments of chaos." Luckily for us, we had more "chaos" than "boredom" today.