Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i Florida Sportsman

Captain Dave Crisp of the Seaward is one smart cookie. He was a great commercial fisherman as a young man, and has been extremely successful as a businessman. He may also qualify as a genius psychologist. I called my friend Dave a few years ago when my boat was in the yard, and one of Florida Sportsman’s best advertisers was bringing his 10-year-old son for his first offshore trip. I was delighted with the weather when we left the inlet aboard the 35 Cabo, but it was pretty obvious by the young man’s silence he was more than a little nervous about the 2-foot sea we were in. “You know Rick,” Dave chimed in, “I was looking through my logbook, and it was this month a few years ago when…

October is always among the breeziest months in Florida. Between cold fronts and tropical systems, a fairly typical day is a 15 mph east-northeast wind. Florida bass fishing legend Shaw Grigsby, like many experts, sees downsides and upsides to wind. “Obviously, if I’m sight fishing, I hate the wind because the ripple disguises any type of fish movement that you would see,” he said. “Also, if the wind muddies the water, that can create issues, even if you’re not sight fishing. If you’re cranking or fishing a spinnerbait or topwater and the wind and waves pound into something, it can totally destroy a fishing area.” On the upside, says Grigsby: “A ripple on the water creates refraction and a strobe-like flash. That relaxes the fish; they don’t see you as…

GULF COAST Tough times to be one who loves fresh snook for supper. Layer upon layer of red tide mitigation closures now blanket much of Florida’s peninsular Gulf Coast. From State Road 64, near Bradenton, south to Gordon Pass, in Collier County, snook are closed through May 31, 2022—which means effectively (with the regular summer closure) through the fall of 2022. This reflects conservation measures implemented to help snook (and seatrout and redfish) recover from severe red tides of 2017 and 2018. Waters north of SR 64, which had been closed to the Pasco/Pinellas County line, were scheduled to reopen to snook harvest this fall, but yet another massive wave of red tide swept into the Tampa Bay region in early summer, prompting emergency closures through Sept. 16—and possibly later…

Last Call for Seatrout: Central East CATCH MORE ONLINE Fish and hunt smarter and more efficiently. Check our daily "feed" to get on the best bets and top seasonal picks for all regions of Florida. And be sure to share your pictures and stories with us! www.floridasportsman.com SEND US YOUR PHOTOS WE WELCOME your fishing and hunting photos for publication in the Action Spotter and in our online community galleries at www.floridasportsman.com. SEND DIGITAL PICTURES , 600 KB to 1 MB in jpeg format. For smartphone photos, email the Actual Size—highest resolution. Images must not have appeared or been submitted elsewhere. Send photos to: photos@floridasportsman.com. INCLUDE NAMES of people pictured, hometowns, location of catch and any key details, such as weight of big catches. www.floridasportsman.com/radio/…

Redfish Rendezvous You can catch redfish year-round in the region, but what separates October from the rest of the year is that the redfish respond to the first few drops in water temperature by schooling up on the outside islands, points, shoals, oyster bars and sandbars. Find the hard bottom around the Gulf side outside islands and you will find concentrations of redfish. The dip in water temperature ultimately brings these fish together as they prosper in the cooler waters that have more dissolved oxygen, especially after summer and early fall water temperatures flirting with the upper 80-degree mark. Predicting when that drop in water temperature will happen throughout the month can be difficult year over year, but a few small cold fronts are generally what triggers the migration as…

Shorter Days, Longer Options Welcome, season change! Or what passes for it. While our fall season seems brief and largely undetectable, you’ll notice changes in the daylight with a later sunrise and an earlier sunset. Wind patterns begin to change and the twilight hours bring a special feel to the air. This slow change is more apparent to our finny friends. Just prior to the first cold front in the Panhandle, baitfish migrate south attracting massive schools of kingfish and Spanish mackerel giving us a head’s up on their movement. Bait will show on deepwater wrecks first along with the arrival of a few “scout” kings ahead of the kingfish schools. Closer to shore on artificial reefs and hard bottom areas from Pasco down to Sarasota, a push of Spanish…

Mullet, Shrimp Runs Happening Change is a beautiful word. I don’t always love it when it comes, but I can promise you October 1 brings the changes I look forward to every year. It’s often still steamy, but there is no mistaking the cool in the air if you walk outside in the early morning. Offshore, I’ll say it one more time. If we are going to get gag grouper within 30 miles of Mayport, it’s going to be this month. So far in 2021 there’s been an ever so slight improvement in party ground grouper, and what may be more important, there’s been an improvement in juveniles in the inshore waterway. So much of what happens on the blue water scene will depend on our Northeasters. If we get…

BEST BET Forty shots at sailfish each day? Not unrealistic if your fall fishing travels take you to a canyon off the Guatemala coast known as The Pocket (not to be confused with the Bahamas Pocket – see main column). The prolific bait throughout the region starts to congegrate in the area, drawing in cartoonish numbers of sailfish (as well as a host of other predators, such as yellowfin and dorado). This is the time and place to break personal bests for size (Pacific sails run larger than our Atlantic, with larger catches averaging 80 to 120 pounds), quantity, or specialty catches such as a sail on the fly. Fall Bonefish on Andros Island Andros Island, the largest land mass of the Bahamas, owns the title of “Bonefish Capital of…

If you have a passion, odds are there’s a Florida license plate with you in mind. Your DMV will gladly even personalize it. Florida offers 120 different specialty plates for various organizations and the money raised from the sale of these plates goes directly to the organization. Judging by the popularity of fishery, conservation, environmental and outdoor plates, you’d think you and your passion as an angler are being well taken care of. Well, the answer is a mixed bag. It’s natural to like that fishing, hunting or conservation plate theme, but you might look more closely at the group behind the tag. I bought the Indian River Lagoon snook tag after moving to Stuart several years ago. Unwittingly, I’ve been supporting the very group that I’ve been banging heads…

When I was a kid, I thought fishing piers were the greatest places to be (and I still think they are). For me, getting dropped off at the pier was better than getting dropped off at the mall, movie theater, skating rink or any of the other places parents deposited kids on weekends and summers. Piers let me get out to water a little deeper than I could reach just surf casting (don’t get me wrong, I have always loved surf casting, too). Piers let me target so many kinds of fish, from whiting and flounder to piling-dwellers like sheepshead to big inshore species like bull reds and big snook to the pelagics like Spanish mackerel and the occasional kingfish. Mostly, piers were a place to learn. They were as…

I’m slowly making my way in my kayak up a tiny unnamed bayou which feeds into Ochlocknee Bay, but my little adventure was not a planned fishing trip. I didn’t intend to fish this Northwest Florida bayou, and I didn’t even know it existed; instead, I was just driving along in the truck scouting for future photo opportunities. But when I saw the bayou with a good tidal current flowing at roadside, I just had to pull over for a closer look. And then when I saw that big, broad tail of a black drum as it stood on its nose and grubbed along the bayou bottom digging up food, I just had to slide the kayak out of the truck bed and go fishing. Kayak, canoes, john boats and…

Bring on the Cool Early fall fishing can be difficult in the Florida Keys. The water temperatures are very warm inshore, making for a tough environment for most species. If you are looking for tablefare, deeper is better. Head to the blue water and keep heading offshore till you find floating debris, birds working or the steep dropoff at Wood’s Wall. Troll with wire leader, as wahoo are common at the Wall and nothing is more upsetting than watching one get away. Deep dropping is another effective way to get some incredible tablefare. The gear for this fishery is specialized and it can be expensive, but it’s very much worth it. I personally like to deep drop in over 600 feet of water and work my way down to 1,000…

Reef, Surf, Lake—Great Fishing on all Fronts The days are shortening, the air is cooling (slightly), fishing tactics are shifting, and hunting season is underway. October is a great month for the outdoorsman in the Southeast Region. Crappie fishing on Lake Okeechobee will be getting better as the water cools. These fish will be moving from their summer haunts out in the deep water to submerged vegetation and structure typically found in three to six feet. Cattail edges and lily pads from Okee-Tantie to Indian Prairie are great places to fish a jig and minnow on the north side of the lake. Areas such as Kreamer and Ritta Island are great starting points on the south side. I prefer to start without a float on my jig, fishing down towards…

The Best Month? The other day my friend and fellow Big Bend angler, Jim Glicco, and I were having a conversation about fishing the inshore waters, post-scallop season. In the course of the conversation, we agreed on a toss-up between October and November as to the best month to fish for spotted seatrout once the crowds of snorkelers leave. Either month has plusses and minuses. October waters are likely to retain some of the summer grasses and baitfish that make our fishery for spotted seatrout so good. By November, depending on the overall scheme of cold weather, some grasses may die back, changing the outlook for inshore anglers. But that’s a subject for next month! Late summer Gulf water temperatures often hit the 90-degree mark in shallow, close-to-shore areas. Solar…

Good Time to Explore It’s a great time to be on the water in October, especially the coastal inshore shallows. Northwest Florida has more than its share of these natural shorelines laced with tidal creeks, oyster bars, small islands and passes. These are all ripe for exploring with shallow draft boats. Both the bugs and temperature have moderated, making it pleasant to ease along with a paddle, push pole or trolling motor to hook up with the gamefish that are active in the shallows. Kayaks, canoes, john boats, skiffs and other shallow-draft boats are suitable, it just depends on one’s preference. A limitation for fishing from a kayak or other paddle boats is fishing and paddling at the same time. The new pedal systems and rudders for kayaks overcome this…

Notes from parents bragging on kids’ fishing exploits are dime a dozen here at Florida Sportsman. Always welcome, of course, but when reader Steve Lotz, of Palm Beach Gardens, put a different spin on things, we were intrigued: “My mother, a retired teacher of elementary and middle school, has turned into a fishing addict!” Steve wrote. “Just this week she has crushed three reds, yellowtail, trout and all the bycatch you could want. “I am very proud and I have never heard of an 80-year-old wading in 3-foot muck catching, landing, cleaning, cooking and repeating weekly.” I had to admit, I hadn’t heard of that either. I knew Patricia Lotz had some good stories to tell, so I caught up with her. Like many Florida moms, over the years Pat…

Experienced Florida anglers have long been aware of the migration of snook, trout, red-fish, mangrove snapper and other saltwater species into coastal rivers during winter, but a study by the University of Florida and the FWC is now quantifying that migration, at least on the Suwannee River, for snook. Anglers along the “Big Bend” area of the west coast have been reporting the northward migration of snook for at least 20 years as fewer winter cold blasts allow these subtropic fish to push their range up the coast. But the UF study is the first to confirm it scientifically. According to Charles Martin, assistant research professor of fisheries and aquatic sciences based at the University of Florida IFAS Nature Coast Biological Station, they found that local anglers began reporting catchable…

Deer hunting the open terrain of Florida’s prairies without a quality pair of binoculars is foolhardy. These animals are adapted to hiding in the open and seemingly evaporate to the naked eye after a few steps into the grasses. Invest as much as possible in good glass and become accustomed to using them. Beyond that, a durable pair of waterproof hiking boots is a must as “dry prairie” is a bit of a misnomer with the sloughs and depression marshes dotting the landscape. Serpents are always a concern, and some folks prefer snake guards, but above all be certain your footwear is comfortable enough for long hikes. Breathable garments are always preferable to cotton to stay relatively cool, especially during the archery seasons. Portable climber stands and lock-ons are necessities…

All Kinds of Fish Moving Down the Line It’s fall migration time! Millions of small baitfish are heading south for the winter and hot on their heels are hungry predators. The offshore fishermen will have opportunities galore for catching migrating Spanish mackerel, kingfish, bonitos, blackfin tuna, sailfish, barracudas, sharks and dolphin fish near the surface. All these worthy fish can be targeted with 15- to 30-pound-class spin and conventional tackle. Or, with a livewell crammed with baitfish, one can chum and then cast a fly rod. Close to the bottom, expect encounters with mutton, mangrove, yellowtail, vermilion and yelloweye snapper, as well as amberjacks, grouper and cobia. Likely baits include live pilchard, threadfin herring, pinfish, cigar minnow, goggle-eyes or a strip of bonito. If you have some electric reels, try…

Get ’Em While You Can October marks the unofficial end of tarpon season in Southwest Florida so there’s not much time left. While there are some tarpon here year-round, most of our adult silver kings depart at summer’s end. The exact timing of their departure varies from year to year but once we’ve had a few mornings of jacket weather then the fishing is about done. Until that happens, you’ll be able to find tarpon in Charlotte Harbor working around schools of glass minnows or shadowing schools of threadfins. There’s another option too: Departing schools of tarpon sometimes stage around offshore artificial reefs in 30 to 50 feet of water. This fishery is not well-known and basically hit-and-miss, but when you hit it right the fishing can be hot. Your…

Find the Bait, Find the Action It won’t be long before the fall baitfish run will dictate a lot of fishing plans. That trace of welcomed cool that comes with October will give signal to the mullet, menhaden, greenies and maybe glass minnows moving down the coastline, beginning around Daytona and quickly progressing southward. Some of the first cobia and inshore kings may be holding around artificial reefs outside Ponce Inlet including the shallow reefs in 35 to 50 feet of water. Baitfish on the reefs will be the key. Cobia grab plenty of the attention when they show around Port Canaveral, Cocoa Beach and the re-named Patrick Space Force Base. Sebastian Inlet doesn’t get the offshore crowds, so the cobia aren’t pressured like the Canaveral fish, meaning your chances…

BEST BET Big bull redfish on the bridges and jetties is going to be your best bet this month. Plan your trip around the falling tide, use live crabs or topwater lures at the Hathaway bridge, and live croakers or pinfish on a Carolina rig at the Destin, Mid-Bay, and 3-Mile bridges. Redfish Schooling at the Passes, Bridges Mature redfish along the Panhandle have been repeating the same spawning rituals for hundreds of years. They spend their summers in the Gulf preparing for when the conditions are just right to begin their fall spawn. Once the water temperatures reach the low 60s these fish will start making their way into the bays along the coast. October is the month when everything comes together, and the big reds will school up…