Fishing with Capt. George Tunison | Ready for a local inshore fishing challenge?
Ready for a Southwest Florida inshore five fish challenge? Start early and head to the surf with a white bucktail to get your snook on board while keeping a sharp lookout for rolling tarpon behind you. If you spot moving tarpon, quietly motor far out ahead of the moving pack and ready your live crab rod or use the same outfit to toss a white bait, pinfish, fly or soft plastic in their path. At night try big Hogy paddletails that create vibration but for day trips along the coast or in the shallows, straight, nose-hooked plastic eels do better.
If you see other boats fishing, anchored, poled or trolling motor-powered, give them plenty of room. There’s lots of space, and lots of fish. Think friendly courtesy.
Fly rod fans should be ready to cast using waist- attached stripping baskets, a bucket or rubber line savers attached to the deck which greatly helps with fly line management on breezy days. Nothing worse than after long hours of waiting to get the perfect shot is to have line control issues ruining casts because the fly line is wrapped around your toes, ankles and trolling motor, causing the fish (or a toe) to instantly break off when the line comes tight.
If your boat isn’t rigged for fly fishing with a snag free front casting deck, then cover your cleats, trolling motors, deck lid hatches, lights, etc., with wet towels. On windy days with tarpon in sight your fly line is guaranteed to find any exposed snag ruining the presentation.
Remember this rule: if you pick up a fly rod at home, it will suddenly become breezy. If you put it in your boat, the wind will blow. That’s just the way it is so mastering your double haul casting technique will keep you fishing. It’s essential to learn the double haul to obtain fly casting distance especially on windy days. Plenty of instruction available on YouTube.
After your tarpon and snook are released, it’s time to beat the bushes for Mr. Redfish. With a higher tide present, cast soft plastic paddletails far back and under cover using side arm skip casting or troll motor or wind drift the flats targeting potholes on lower tide phases.
No luck? Then it’s time for a bait-and-wait strategy. If a red is close by, his nose will bring him to your offering as redfish always seem to be hungry.
With the harder-to-catch fish out of the way you can now relax as you drift grassy flats looking for hungry trout while casting soft plastics in front of the skiff while trailing a plastic or shrimp rigged float bait behind you.
With your May inshore challenge completed, it’s time to head offshore. Have a taste for red snapper? Now open till July 31 with a two fish per angler limit and a 16-inch minimum total length to harvest. In the mix find yellowtails and mangroves along with never- know-when-they-will-show cobia, so always have a rod rigged with a plastic eel, colorful bucktail or ready to attach pinfish. Plenty of Spanish mackerel action for lite tackle fun from inside the passes to offshore.
It’s super sharkey right now from the shallows to far offshore so grab your chum blocks and add some wire to your leader and take the shark challenge. If you desire a real world class workout, we have back-breaking hammerheads over a thousand pounds but the real fun is smaller 10 to 100-pound specimens on lite tackle in shallow water. Use a quick release anchor system to follow bigger fish and get them pictured, released and on their way rather than fight them to exhaustion.
Sharks taste good but please consult your FWC website before taking Jaws home for dinner as a great many are thankfully protected.
Capt. George Tunison is a Cape Coral resident fishing guide. You can contact him at captgeorget4@yahoo.com or (239) 440-1621.