Snook!!! and Hurricanes???

As a boy growing up in North Central Florida, I was blessed with many species of fish to target and catch. One of those was not the infamous snook. Snook are primarily found in the areas of Florida south of the Big Bend region such as Tampa Bay, the 10,000 Islands and the Palm Beaches. The reason snook did not habitate in the northern parts of Florida were due to the colder water temperatures reached during the winter months. Thanks to Al Gore's discovery of global warming (well, he does take credit for it) and the snook hearing about this, they are now being caught as far north as Cedar Key and Suwannee.

This past week has been a welcome site for people in Florida with huge amounts of rainfall being dropped each day. Thankfully, the front decided to drift away just in time for some fishing. We headed out of Yankeetown early in the AM after a visit to Captain's Cove Outfitters for some Zman lures. The goal for the day was to target redfish during the high tide which happened to be right at day break. As much as I wanted to catch reds, I knew there would be a small window of opportunity to target snook in a close by area because of the overcast conditions and outgoing tide. When it comes to choosing between snook or reds, I am always going to run at the opportunity to catch a linesider. We started fishing the area with topwater lures but did not have any success. I switched to a Zman ShrimpZ in the New Penny color rigged with a weighted Trigger HookZ and worked the flooded grass patches. Within a few casts, I hooked up with a nice slot red. Surprisingly, this would end up being the one and only red we would catch today. I did lose a 30" + red in this area that also took the New Penny ShrimpZ. As we continued on, Jake switched back to topwater and immediately had several big fish blow up at his Skitter Walk. We both suspected it could be snook but couldn't be sure unless we actually caught one. I followed his last blow up by throwing the ShrimpZ in the same spot. This fish did not miss grabbing my ShrimpZ and took off for the spartina grass. After a few minutes of fighting the fish, I boated a nice 28" snook. Jake switched to soft plastics and got another small snook on a New Penny PaddlerZ. These were the only two we got to the boat, but had several more misses that were probably snook. We also added three 18"-20" trout that made for a nice fish fry.

I also wanted to briefly mention a fishing trip me and my tournament partner Chris Adams had Memorial Day weekend. The family and I spent the holiday weekend with them at their home in Jacksonville. As most of you might know, Jax had a tropical storm roll through town that weekend. We decided to ride it out there for the weekend and get as much fishing in as we could. The weather didn't allow for much fishing time, but we did get in a few hours of bass fishing and intercoastal fishing. Bass fishing was great with us probably landing 20 fish up to 5 lbs. in just a few hours on the lake. All bass were caught on White 1/4 oz. Jigalo Jigs and drop shotting Rain MinnowZ. Sunday was the day the storm made landfall but we were able to fish the intercoastal early that morning. We set out hoping to catch anything but expected to catch reds and trout. There were none of these biting this day, but lucky for us and the girls, the flounder were hungry. We ended the morning with 12 up to 19". Flounder were caught on Houdini - PaddlerZ and ShrimpZ. The biggest two were kept for a nice fish fry tht night paired with some local Mayport shrimp. All in all, it made for a great weekend and hurricane party!