By the time we reach the dog days of summer, bass fishing in Florida can feel like an endurance test. The sun gets high early, the air feels like you just opened the door to your dryer midway through drying a load of wet towels, and much of the shallow water that looked promising during spring can suddenly seem lifeless.

Take the Spacefish Angler Psychology Test and find out how the way you think might be helping or hurting your fishing.

Some lures catch fish because they look incredibly realistic. Others catch fish because they do something that a predator simply can’t ignore. For me, few baits demonstrate that better than what I loosely call the dart bait: a small, slender soft plastic without a paddle tail, curly tail or other appendage doing most of the work.

As we get back to school this week, I wanted to do something a little different. Usually when I sit down to write one of these reports, we’re talking about fishing. Maybe it’s what the snook are doing, a lure I’ve been throwing, somewhere I’ve been exploring in the kayak, or some new piece of fishing gear I probably don’t actually need.

I thought I was done with ICAST, but this past week we cranked up football, and this past weekend I was in Georgia for my nephews birthday party, so no fishing for me. I decided to write a piece about the new VoyaX MOSSA series of fishing kayaks. These two boats won the best in show award for Best Boat or Watercraft this year at ICAST.

Last week I wrote a tackle review after our trip to ICAST. This week I wanted to wrap up ICAST, and give some of my final thoughts on the show as a whole. I chose a cool fishing picture to put as the cover because for years, I imagined ICAST as Disney World for fishermen. As a kid paging through tackle catalogs and magazine articles, it felt like a mythical place where every company unveiled revolutionary new products and the future of fishing was decided in a convention hall somewhere in Orlando.

Last week the Spacefish crew went over to iCast. I went to Orlando with a simple question in mind when looking at all the new products being unveiled. Does any of this actually make fishing better for the average Central Florida angler?

Today I am going to recap the kayak fishing my brother and I did on our big family vacation 4th of July week. My parents, my wife and 2 boys, and my brother’s family – his wife and 3 kids all shared an Air B&B on a canal in Marco Island.

Like a lot of anglers around the Space Coast, I tend to spend most of my free time poking around the Indian River Lagoon in my kayak, chasing redfish, trout, snook, and the occasional tarpon. I also enjoy kayak bassin’ all over Central Florida. But every now and then it’s good to switch things up, and that’s exactly what I did this the week before last.

Every angler who spends enough time on the Mosquito Lagoon eventually runs into the same problem. You’re cruising a shallow flat when a redfish pushes a wake through a patch of turtle grass. Maybe a trout explodes on bait in the middle of a grassy bottom area. You make a cast, your lure lands perfectly, and then…Grass. You retrieve your lure and come back with enough salad to feed a family of four.

One of the Bass I caught from the cove on the NW corner of Poinsett near the SJR Channel.

Hopefully this will be the first of many kayak Bass trips we get to take together. And yes, I did give her a hard time for the using the grippers on a small Bass.

There are a ton of Lily Pads on Lake Osceola, the Frog bite was really good when we were there this past weekend.

A trip south to Lake Ida is not just about Peacock's, it's a great place to catch Largemouth too!

I went back to Fox Lake Saturday, here are 3 of the species I caught Saturday afternoon.

The Bass fishing on the freshwater side took the cake, but this was my most exciting inshore catch on the Eau Gallie River this weekend. I have not caught very many of these guys in […]

While this is certainly not anything to brag about in the size category, I thought this fish was really cool looking in how dark it was. I know that Largemouth Bass are known as Black […]

My boys and I had a blast last night at Wickham Park. We caught 4 StumpKnockers in roughly an hour of fishing. Each one we landed brought tons of joy and excitement.

I caught this on my last inshore trip on the 4th. It was in the shallows off the mangroves close to the radio tower in Downtown Melbourne.

I caught this on my last inshore trip back on the 4th. The warmer weather led to a much better bite.