Captain’s Corner for April 29 Dave Zalewski 460-9893

The Gulf of Mexico off of the Tampa Bay area is considered to be shallow water compared to many areas of the world where the bottom drops dramatically just a few miles from shore. Our waters allow the sunlight to penetrate to the bottom which in turn promotes vegetative and reef growth on any type of structure such as natural limestone reefs, artificial reefs and wrecks. that protrudes from the bottom. At this time of the year we have been devoting time to both bottom fishing and trolling. Trolling for pelagic fish, those that can be found throughout the water column, is best when targeting higher profile structure like the wrecks and artificial reefs which tend to harbor larger concentrations of baitfish and their apex predators such as kingfish, Spanish mackerel, bonita and barracuda. Our bottom fishing for grouper and snapper often is conducted in areas close to the mid water artificial reefs and wrecks . The reason for that is that even though the artificial reefs were placed on areas of sand bottom to prevent damage to natural reefs, every one of them were placed adjacent to limestone areas that already had a concentration of benthic fish.
The kingfish bite has been as good as it gets for the past two weeks. Spanish mackerel has been disappointing. We will be targeting kingfish on the artificial reefs trolling both hardware at 6 knots or slow trolling live bait caught on site as slow as the boat will go in the morning and switching to bottom fishing in the afternoons as long as the kingfish remain in our area.