# Everglades backcountry report, 21 July



## lemaymiami (Feb 9, 2007)

This will be brief just to let folks know that I haven't disappeared....  The past six weeks my bookings have slowed down quite a bit with most trips at night locally for tarpon and snook around docklights and in bridge shadows in the urban areas of Biscayne Bay.  We've caught and released our share of tarpon up to around forty pounds along with plenty of snook -when we could get them to eat....

Down at Flamingo most days I have the place to myself (miles and miles of protected waters with hardly ever another boat all day long....).  My most recent trip was a bit of exploring looking for shallow spots holding tripletail.  Didn't see many -but did find some nice snook on topwater lures before 9am.... Here's a pic of the biggest of two slot sized snook (around 32" long) that just had to hammer a Skitterwalk...

After a quick photo it was back in the water for this big girl.... Our snook season won't open until 1 September -there should be plenty to go around.  

Along with the snook I didn't have much trouble finding bright silver speckled trout in one river mouth or other.  Managed to invite a few home for dinner.... Everywhere I went there were places where you could keep kids hooked up continuously with jacks, ladyfish, and mangrove snapper.  Matter of fact any place showing surface activity meant a hook up every cast.  The number of hookups would only depend on how many lures were in play... Mixed in wherever I went along the coast any hooked fish had a shark nearby and it was only by really getting on top of any hooked fish that they came to the boat in one piece....  Many of the sharks were relatively small, under six feet long, but a few were respectable sized at eight feet long or better.  Guys that spend hours on one beach or other trying to get a single shark bite would just go crazy along the west coast of the Everglades the rest of the summer...  The only question would be how long could you keep hooking them?

The last spot I hit was a live bait spot in a river that usually produces a few grouper some as big as 30", gag grouper along with the usual goliaths... Yesterday it was big grouper, probably goliaths, that just took me to school.... They were pretty much un-stoppable and so strong that I couldn't even raise a heavy spinning rod to brace it against my hip for leverage... With a vertical river bank 20 feet away you can guess the outcome...

This kind of report will be typical of the rest of the summer.  As we move towards August the big tarpon will begin to make a showing, starting their feeding to prep for the coming fall and winter....

* be a hero, take a kid fishing...


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## Bob_Rogers (Oct 14, 2009)

Thanks for the report. Good to see that I'm not the last angler on earth that still uses redhead topwaters at dawn/dusk.


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## lemaymiami (Feb 9, 2007)

....pretty hard to beat red/white - and not just for topwaters.


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## RunningOnEmpty (Jun 20, 2015)

I see the old Daiwa Whisker reel. I have one that's 20 years old and it's still going.


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