Everglades Fishing – Captain Ned Small

Bill Chorske, snook.

‘Sorry I’ve missed a couple of phone calls, or tried to return your calls and left a message or got no answer. That’s why email is better, that’s the best way to reach me and get a direct response.  I’m fishing every day and have little time left over and I can check the email early in the morning.  I really don’t have much in the way of open dates until July, but that’s one of my favorite times to fish the Everglades, probably one of the best months of the year.  

A wonderfull day of fishing,  well, maybe not so great on the catching side. There were chances for everything today, giant tarpon, snook and reds. We messed with all three species but we spent three hours in a remote backcountry cove with an adrenaline pushing number of giants. The water was windswept, the sky was grey and overcast and spitting rain. It was almost impossible to see, but we made a couple of poling drifts across it and got a couple of credible shots. A cold front tonight, everything is going to be different again.

Greg Mentzer, redfish, Everglades Style! I’ll post a couple of other photo’s of Greg on the Gallery. There is a lot of fishing news, I can’t keep track of it all, clear flats, wind, cold fronts, muddy water, pushing into the backcountry, tarpon encounters, giant snook sightings, jewfish on the flats, stingrays and sharks. Sawfish. It’s tough fishing, even for the small ones, the water is so warm the fish are just drifting around aimlessly, there’s nothing weatherwise to force any kind of congregation and there’s very little baitfish activity. If you can find the concentrations of bait though, you might just catch a nice fish. Right now,  I’m looking for glass minnows.

It’s getting hard to keep track, we’ve jumped, fought, lost and battled to the boat, probably nineteen tarpon, in the last half dozen go-outs. They’ve ranged in size from ten inches, to five pounds, to thirty, fourty, sixty and eighty. And we haven’t even really gotten started. Kevin Becker got one, and Bob Milgram has been tuffeling with them too. I like fishing with Bob because he’s always rooting for the fish, even while he’s doing his best to land them.

O.K. Welcome to the site. It’s just been born and we’re going to go through some growing pains, well,  I am anyway.

You’ll see that the reports have a place for commentary. Feel free to have fun, please, the first time you post there will be a delay of an indeterminate length of time until I approve your ‘membership,’ from the ‘command center.’ I’ll try to do it within one day, after that, in future posts,  your comments should come up in ‘virtual real time.’

A few guys are logged on already, let’s see how far we get, no need to change anything. Just try a post, I mean a comment.