Red tide not putting a damper on fishing – yet
Well despite there being some patches of red tide on our local waters, fishing around Anna Maria with Just Reel fishing charters remains fairly good.
Finding areas where the red tide is not present is key to finding the bite and typically, if you can find these areas, the bite can be really good.
We are anglers are in search if this clean water because you guessed, so are the fish. In theory this could be like finding your own gold mine if lucky. At times, in my experiences, concentrations of fish can be found in these areas, which can mean some great action for the angler.
I found one of these recently when fishing for spotted seatrout. While fishing an area where the trout bite is typically good I ended up finding hundreds of trout which make the bite excellent. Every bait resulted in a trout. Now I think the reason for the great abundances of these trout is that they were fleeing the red tide. I don’t work for NOAA or Mote Marine so I can’t say for sure this is a fact, but I do know that for a couple of days in a row when the red tide was present down south I fished this spot and caught more trout than normal. A lot more to be truthful. It only makes sense that the trout were vacating the red tide areas and staged up in an area where the water was not tainted. And luckily it was all around my boat.
