2/23/17 February Everglades Fishing Report

Well yesterday was a wash and I’m glad I had planned to have it off.  It rained all day up around the mainland, and quite a bit down here, as well as blew 25 mph out of the south.  I was thinking today it’d be a tough day as the water temps dropped back to around 70 in the backcountry, plus it was blowing 15 out of the west now, and that usually isn’t a good thing especially for things like tarpon and such.  Anyways I had Doug and Carolyn today (as well as tomorrow) and we made the best of it.  We found some live pilchards nearby on the way out so we caught maybe 4 dozen of them.  I decided to run back into some of the everglades creeks to try for snook since we had the bait.  There was a boat where I first wanted to go, so we tried a few other spots nearby but not much luck.  We than ran into another creek, and gave it a little bit and eventually got a little snook bite going.  We probably caught about 8 or so, and missed a few others, so it was decent fishing!  We ran out of bait after a while and then decided to do some snapper fishing to get a little dinner.  We hit one of the islands I fished last week when we had a stiff west breeze like we did today, and the snappers were chewing pretty good.  We got our limit and all nice 12-14 inch fish which usually can be tough to get on shrimp.  We lost one on a piece of cut bait that was either a big 3 lb snapper, or maybe another snook, never got a good look and it cut us off at the boat.  Anyways all in all it was a pretty good day.  Tomorrow I think we’ll try the mackerels since the wind is suppose to lay down somewhat, and maybe try for a tarpon or shark later on if things have a chance to warm up enough.

Capt. Rick Stanczyk

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