Wintertime fishing is here and with it brings cooler temperature, clearer water and some of the lowest tides of the year. Inshore we are catching cobia, trout, snook, redfish, sheepshead, and even some small sharks. The fishing has been excellent as of late and should continue right along with the mild weather.

Offshore the fishing has been excellent for grouper, snapper, amberjack and hogfish. There is still time to book your wintertime fishing trip!
We are also now taking booking for spring of 2017. Spring offers some of our best fishing of the year so book now with your Fishing Guide Tampa Bay! On some of our recent trips this week we have caught some nice snook and redfish along with some tasty tripletail!

Tripletail are not the prettiest nor the smartest and undoubtedly lack a few of the attributes of some of our west coasts most popular gamefish, but tripletail are in my opinion one of the most underappreciated and underrated species we have. Some would call these armor plated prehistoric looking fish ugly, but they are without a doubt some of the hardest fighting and best tasting fish available anywhere around the sunshine state. Tampa Bay and its near shore gulf waters are home to a great population of tripletail and these hard fighting high jumping gamefish can be caught year round.

A few months ago my friend Steve and I were scouting around the bay for an upcoming tournament when the subject of tripletail fishing came up. Steve also has a soft spot in his fishing heart for trips and we began telling old fish stories about the species. We both caught our first tripletail inside Tampa Bay over 20 years ago and have continued to refine our techniques ever since. It was funny hearing someone else share a passion for a fish that is not on most people’s A list. After a few minutes of Steve proclaiming to be the world’s greatest tripletail fisherman and me laughing at him uncontrollably I had somehow been convinced to divert course and put our scheduled scouting trip on hold to go catch a few tripletail for dinner.

Over the next hour we took turns catching some very nice tripletail and it was fun to see the commonalities and differences in how we fish for them. I must admit that the tails did seem to have me by the tail that day as I think I hooked three times as many as I landed. After it was all said and done Steve did catch the biggest tripletail of the day but I firmly believe it was because he just had the better guide!