We sure had to work for it this week!

The bait on the beach thinned out a little, but the fish seemed to be absent. We got bait within 30 minutes on Monday, but we found very few fish. We saw one group of bonito and three tarpon roll in total. None of which wanted to eat. There are three reasons why this might have happened. The water became a chalky clay color due to too much west wind, a few days after a full moon until about a week after is usually a slower time to fish, and most nearshore fish migrate through the summer. There should be several more nearshore tarpon opportunities through at least October if you missed out.

The Indian River seems to have gone brown in most portions, and the bait has left a lot of it. If you know where you can find either clear water or enough bait to keep the fish happy, you should be able to catch snook, tarpon, and a few redfish. Otherwise, I would avoid it and fish either the Banana River or Mosquito Lagoon. Both of which are doing slightly better right now with snook, tarpon, trout, and redfish being the top targets.

Red snapper “season” was a roller coaster this year! I was going to fish Friday right at opening for both red and mangrove snapper, but the weather forecast absolutely fell apart. I decided to take my chance with the window of calm seas before potential storms Friday afternoon. We limited on the first drop on really nice fish and beat the storms! The forecast showed that we would probably get caught in a thunderstorm Saturday afternoon, so we left early. It was pretty sloppy, and we could not get away from baby red snapper. We finally caughtsome decent enough fish and called it on that. Sunday was the same story with two differences. We caught a kingfish on the way down, and the seas were at our back on the way in.

As a legal reminder, be sure to have your reef fish permit and descending device if you are bottom fishing. The permit has been mandatory since July 1st, and the descending device is mandatory starting on July 15th. I suggest you use a wire leader on it so the endangered sandbar shark doesn’t take your overpriced descending device.

Check out these videos of epic tarpon fishing from about two weeks ago near Sebastian: