Everglades Fishing – Captain Ned Small

Foggy morning. Sand flies biting. Tarpon in the Sisters and off the beach. Everywhere their supposed to be. Beautiful weather. Snook are scarce, but if we find one he bites! All pelagics are biting. Mackeral, pompano, jack, etc.

Steven and Seth Erickson hunted sleepers this morning with light spinning gear, braided line and secret lures. They each had shots at several giants and Steve finally hooked one we speculate was …well, easily over a hundred pounds. We wasted the rest of the day chasing black drum, more tarpon, pompano, sugar trout, whiting, more tarpon, black tips, spotted sea trout, lemon sharks, and …wait …was that one? Rolling over there?

Winds are still from the south but losing velocity. Approx 8 -12 mph. Lots of calm water to fish in.  More tarpon arriving, most of them huge although we saw a pair of forty pounders in one cove. Jeff Wyman and Gary Sherman put two giants in the air today, on fly, smashing up all the equipment.

A weather change is coming. After this long spell of southwest wind we’re expecting a shift to the northeast. If that happens we’ll be fishing some areas of the Park that have been out of reach for a while.

Conditions remain the same. We fished a half day with fly rods even though conditions were tough. Murky water and tiresome winds. Low tide in the morning was the best chance for snook. We spotted two in shallow cove and got a cast to them. We got the larger of them to bite and he ran us through a few jumps before spitting the hook. Two sight shots at tarpon, sleepers, each about seventy pounds. Captain Bruce Miller was guiding with us today using spinning gear and they got a snook into the boat and jumped a big tarpon on a jerk bait.

…along the coast and in the 10,000 Islands. Winds are not so strong that you can’t fish, just that sighting conditions are a little tough right now. Still, we are finding snook and red’s in the Islands and even sighting them along the oysters at low tide. The Backcountry toward Lostman’s and beyond remains clear and perhaps has the best potential, right now,  for a big snook on fly. We found a school of juvenile tarpon yesterday, in one of the  Lostman’s headwater creeks. With Gulf temperatures warming to the mid seventies big tarpon are beginning to show in all the right places. We have jumped three on fly, two that were 120 pound class and another about 90 pounds.