SPACEFISH REPORT

Some fishing stories start with a bent rod. This one starts with a 17-year-old kid from Pennsylvania who had never seen the ocean…

I wish I were bringing you more joyful news, but…Florida has found itself in the throes of a true winter gut punch. A prolonged polar vortex has pushed cold air deep into the peninsula, dropping water temperatures across rivers, lagoons, canals, and backwaters. For Florida’s tropical and subtropical fish species, especially snook, this kind of cold can be devastating.

It was cold and windy, but with largely a dominate west wind, the surf remained very fishable all week. I had a few limited opportunities to get out there and took them, and the bite was pretty active.

Under the FWC’s new regional management rules for spotted seatrout in the Indian River Lagoon region…

Pic. From after the big freeze. caught on chatter.

With the recent cold temps it has been a little brutal on us Floridians that are not accustomed to below freezing for long periods of time.

If you’ve been keeping up with my recent winter fishing reports, you’ve probably noticed a common theme: I have been riding a roller coaster of weather changes. Between blustery NNW winds, rising and falling barometric pressure, and water temps bouncing all over the place, this winter has been an exercise in patience.

We only got out one day this week, but it was good, both boats did very, very well. We ended up with six sailfish between the two boats and a pile of kingfish so, as I stated, the fishing was very good.

Good morning all my Sebastian Inlet fans, I hope you all had a great weekend, even though it was BRUTALLY cold both days, and stayed warm.

Resilience is one trademark of big black drum. These fish can handle colder temperatures better than many of the other gamefish species that we target in the wintertime here on the Space Coast.

Fishing has been really pretty epic this past week with crystal clearwater and hungry schools of black drum and redfish eating live shrimp.

On account of the painfully cold and windy conditions forecasted for the week ahead, I was willing to roll the dice yesterday on an afternoon surf fishing sesh in Melby beach. I expected to freeze my ass off, and 100% did, but nothing could have prepared me for the armada of Spice Harvesting Machines from the movie #DUNE that were running up and down the beach all day.

Launched this morning with 54° water temps and a solid bite. With a cold front rolling in Sunday–Monday, expect the artificial bite to slow, but live bait is getting absolutely crushed right now.

It seems as though our recent spring time weather here in the New Smyrna Beach area has gone to the wayside for upcoming week. Here in the Central Florida area we will be experiencing some much cooler conditions then this past week.

Ok gang, every year there are certain events that happen that I try to predict in advance, but often even us so-called “professionals” don’t get it exactly right. Obviously, my crystal ball isn’t 100 percent correct all of the time. Maybe it needs a tune up. Lol!