I have to be honest with the weather we have been experiencing I cancelled four trips last week and four this week. I tried to cancel the one for Thursday but my guys were die hards. I told them if we caught one fish I'd be impressed. Now let me tell you why. Many of you know that I live on the water in Apollo Beach. The last trip I ran a couple of weeks ago the water temperature behind my house was 71.5 degrees yesterday it was 52.8 degrees. I would say this is not good.
Captain Mike and myself have a so called creed or what ever you want to call it. On days when is right sometimes the fishing is tuff so it's best to stack the deck in your favor when ever possible and never play when it's stacked against you. So I was stressing to say the least and thought if I were a fish in this frigid water what would I do.
You guessed it head to the warm water at the power plant. The water temperature there was 68.9 degrees and tons of life around, rays, big schools of catfish, manatees and dolphins. After riding around a bit trying to figure out the best plan of attack we see sharks and lots of them. We anchored up, put out a chum block to start our slick. I took about four of five minutes to rig the rods with wire, then cut up some mullet and bait the hooks. We kind of fan casted across the chum slick with three rods. No sooner did the third bait hit the water the first rod sung out. Fish on! It was a small black tip about a four footer. Then the second rod screamed another Black tip about a five footer. This action was hard to beat. We caught several black tips up to 40 pounds and one true hammer head that was between 40 and 50 pounds.
On light tackle winter time cold and no walleye or salmon in Tampa Bay sharks ain't a bad bet. So remember always try to stack the deck in your favor. We saw alot of snook but with the cold water we didn't want to mess with them because of the mortality in such harsh conditions and they probably wouldn't eat anyway.
