March 12th, 2008
When the wind laid down the bite picked up.
Here's how you can predict the wind forecast and be more successful than those who get paid to foretell the breeze here in the Tampa Bay area. Take some random things like a toothbrush, a rock, a phone, a nickel, and a twig. Put them in a bag and shake them up. Then, throw the bag in the air and when it hits the ground, what falls out of the bag will be tomorrow's wind speed. That doesn't make sense? Yeah, well, neither do the predictions that the weather man has made recently. Or ever, for that much. Oh well. Whatcha' gonna' do?
The good news is that when the wind lays down we can find fish and they are hungry. The Tarpon Springs area has some large schools of redfish roaming around and some super sized trout.
The large trout are coming from shallow water. We've been getting them up to 23" but a fellow angler today reported catching 20 trout over 20" today with the largest being 26". Smaller trout are in deep cuts through shallow flats and they can be caught by the dump truck load on Bass Assassin 4" shads or Exude Darts in dark colors. Rig them on a 1/8oz jig head and you are likely to catch one every other cast all day long.
The redfish have moved. If you think you know where they are you are probably wrong. The last couple of days following this latest cold front has brought southerly winds which has pushed greenbacks into the area. As a fellow guide quipped yesterday, "they got a taste of the greenbacks and they are following them." My charter yesterday caught their fill of trout by noon and wanted to boat some reds so we went looking... for 4 more hours and 
couldn't find them in their recent haunts. I have them again tomorrow so I went out today to look for the reds on my own. What a pleasant surprise today when I not only found the redfish I was looking for but I also found tons of large snook sticking their head out on the flats. I hooked a pig of a snook nearing 35" and lost him while I tried to land him by myself without a net. The water temperature topped 70 degrees and that spells springtime snook blitzing. Hopefully we won't get too many more cold fronts. If we don't, the snook bite should really go off.
Look for redfish to be moving around following the bait and trout to be just about everywhere you find bait as well. The big trout will be shallow in the afternoons on high tides and the reds will be in moving water along deeper shorelines which is where the baitfish tend to congregate this time of year. You might have to look real hard to see them as they might be in water up to 4 feet deep. Throw Bass Assassin shad style jerk baits or Exude Darts or RT Slugs in dark colors on jig heads or if you can find greenbacks you might really whack them.
