Fishing with Capt. George Tunison | Hot spots for tarpon, redfish and baitfish, plus a few more tips
After the recent full moon, Boca Grande’s tarpon should really turn on looking to eat your crabs, shrimp, pinfish and squirrel-fish. I suggest getting out hours before sunrise for best results. Don’t forget there’s an army of overstuffed nasty attitude bulls and submarine-sized hammerheads also there fishing for tarpon, so make sure your tackle is stout enough to get the fish to the boat and released, hopefully in one piece.
Long battles weaken any fish making them an easy target. Attacks occur during the fight and quite often at boat-side but tarpon are often still vulnerable hours after surviving a long exhausting battle. Free spool; jab “Jaws” with a paddle, maneuver the boat or cut the line, whatever you can do to save a 50-year-old fish from an early death — and definitely don’t fall in.
Captiva Pass has tarpon in and out with trout on the inside and Spanish macs in and around the pass to offshore. Good tarpon activity in the south of Pine Island Sound in the St. James City area and jumping reports from the causeway as well.
Assorted size snook and redfish along with trout, bonnet heads and bulls of various sizes and even some small but fun cobia along the mangroves and bars on both sides of the harbor with better fishing in the Bull and Turtle bays and parts of the West Wall area for a good variety of fish, including tarpon. For several seasons these areas closer to the Gulf have been better overall inshore gamefish producers than the east side of the harbor and Matlacha where we have already lost too many areas of vital sea grasses due to poor water quality contaminated from a variety of sources. As always it’s a simple formula; No habitat = No fish.
Are you using loop knots for tying on jigs and soft plastics but still end up catching weeds not fish? Wrong knot. There are several loop knot variations but with many leaving the tag or cut off end facing forward away from the lure, that leaves a short stub that collects weeds/slime/leaves during the retrieve. When picking a loop knot, not only pick the right, rear-facing tag end configuration, but also research what line diameters your chosen knot works best with.
Lots of bait available in time to light up redfish and snook-infested mangrove shorelines so break out your nets and bait bats. Make sure to purchase a quality net and take care of it as they aren’t cheap. What diameter, weight, length and mesh size are the issues. Experienced guides and mates throw up to 10 to 12-foot diameter or even larger nets. The casual angler can get by with a 6-foot diameter model but an 8-footer obviously catches more. A good all-around, non-commercial net choice might be an 8-foot model of good quality having a 1/4″ to 3/8″ mesh size and weighing in at 1 to 1.5 pounds per foot. Deeper water collecting calls for more lead weight to be efficient. There’s plenty of instructional throwing videos on the net and, of course, practice makes perfect. If you don’t or won’t throw a cast net, then try Sabiki rigs or pinfish traps.
As of this writing, the Jug Creek area is a dependable white bait stop and also where you will also find Spanish mackerel and trout action.
Are your live wells up and running well? Time to replace those rusty pumps keeping your baits frisky and looking for trouble. Serious white baiters usually have a bait bat onboard. If you don’t know a bait bat is, it’s a cartoonish looking plastic over-sized bat with the top cut out. Drop in a dozen baits and with practice and your throwing arm you can broadcast your baits a long distance and quite accurately which can get a whole shoreline of ho-hum lazy fish into piranha mode in seconds.
Capt. George Tunison is a Cape Coral resident fishing guide. You can contact him at (239) 579-0461 or via email at captgeorget3@aol.com.