Summer is finally here and the snook bite is great. On my first day of summer I caught my personal biggest river snook, which was in between 33 and 34 inches. Every trip since then has resulted in many more snook and good size trout. There have been a lot of snook under docks with rocky shores, and plenty of redfish cruising around docks with mangrove shores. Juvenile tarpon are in the canals for the summer and most of them can be found under the deeper part of docks in the Banana River and Indian River. Any small bait fish you catch in the cast net near where you want to fish are probably being eaten by the local predators and live shrimp are always a good bet.

For the last few weeks the water quality has been extremely bad. This hasn’t stopped the bite, though. Small finger mullet have been very easy to get in the canals around Satellite, and are great bait. Pilchards are definitely easier for smaller fish to get, but those finger mullet get the job done. Redfish have been the main eating fish, but trout, tarpon, and snook have also been in the mix. All of the tarpon in the canals were very big (for canal tarpon), and most of the redfish were slot. Trout and snook sizes were varying. Hopefully the weather will be better next week so I can go on the hunt for something a little bigger.

My boat has been out of the water for the past week, but I just got it back for the weekend. With the water being super high and lots of tiny finger mullet going through the canals right now, the bite is on!

This week, due to an algae bloom, the water got very dirty and green — especially in the northern Indian River. To avoid this, my dad and I went south of the power lines, and the water looked a lot better. With the water being very low, most of the bigger fish were under the docks a little deeper. There were still fish in the mangroves, but much smaller.

This week the bite was definitely on! My dad and I went to two spots which both produced tons of fish.

This week, I went out of my comfort zone a little bit, throwing artificial instead of live bait and trying some new spots. I used soft plastics in the satellite canals, but wished I had some live bait because there were lots of floating snook that just wouldn’t eat.

This week the redfish were not out and about like they have been, but the snook were. White bait and mullet were both available and worked well. I used white bait and mullet which both worked very well. We tried four different areas that usually hold fish and at each site the snook were all bunched up together.

This week I took a trip south to Sebastian for some big snook. There were two spots that I was really looking forward to try, but it took some time getting there because we got sidetracked by a big school of big tarpon on the way down. It was an amazing site.

This week I got the chance to go out with Capt. Alex Hughey on an inshore fishing trip. He put my dad and me on some great fish. We caught nice redfish, big trout, and a very unexpected tarpon. Alex also taught us about our fish finder and how to use it for more than finding bait. We plan to use this knowledge for some bridge monsters in the future. Last week the snook were on fire but this week they were hard to find. The redfish seemed to take their place. Last week I went fishing with live pilchards one day and live mullet the next, but couldn’t find much except for schools of jack. On the last stop of the we landed on a school of slot-sized snook, one of which did eat but got gill wrapped and broke the leader.

This week’s forecast was for rain and bad weather daily, but it turned out to be beautiful all week for the most part. I went out with mullet a few times and fished shorelines for snook and reds, but nothing seemed to want my bait. Out of one and a half days of fishing, my friend and I caught two slot snook — that’s a lot of time fishing in summer heat to only catch two fish! We were seeing a lot more snook that just wouldn’t bite. I also had a big redfish nose my bait for what felt like forever until it decided it wasn’t hungry and went back under the dock.

Cooper Cohen absolutely crushed the monster bonefish on fly while on vacation in Hawaii fishing with Capt. Chris Wright.