Capt. Danny R. Guarino
Inshore Fishing Charters, Ruskin Florida
Reporting 3-31-08 through 3-06-08
Boy, was the weather good through Thursday. Lows in the 60’s and highs in the 80’s. Not bad for the 1st week of April
Kind of a slow week for Charters, I got out to look for a few new areas and found concentrations of Snook up and down the South Shore of Tampa Bay. It seemed like the Snook were on the move from the passes out onto the flats. I also spotted some Redfish up underneath the mangroves. The Reds were holding close to the Mangrove roots in pods of 2 to 3 fish.
On Thursday I picked up my Clients at about 9:00 am. . We fished from the Cockroach Bay area north to Apollo Beach. And caught snook and snook and more snook. We had to move around a bit to get the boat anchored up just right so we could put our baits in front of them. The biggest Snook went about 27 inches with a bigger one breaking off to the mangrove monster.
Friday’s trip was a trip I don’t ever want to repeat. Our pick up was to be 9:00am with bait out of down town Tampa. Now, please remember the only place that I knew that was holding bait is the Skyway Bridge, and as I always say you do what you know. So I made the trip to the bridge at 5:30 am, I through the net until about 8:00 and netted about 100 baits. Just enough to fish with, but not enough to chum. Now at 8:00am I head the boat north with a 20 knot wind at my back. It was up and down the entire way. I got to the pick up point gathered my thoughts and clients and made the run back down to the Cockroach Bay area. This time we were head into the 20 knot wind. We got to the Little Manatee River shaken but not broken. The trip was worth it and we landed about 20 Snook in about 3 hours. Again the biggest was about 27 inches. We also managed a 24 inch red fish as well as a 20 inch trout. Not a bad day of fishing but the wind got the best of us. We made the trip back to Tampa and to ad insult to injury it rained on us from Apollo Beach to the mouth of the Hillsborough River.
I have heard from several sources that the Spanish mackerel have moved into the bay as far north as Apollo Beach. They may be further north but no one has reported it to me.
With the water temperature rising into the 70’s we should continue to see some good action with Snook and a continued good bite for trout. The Spanish mackerel bite will only get better from this point forward.
The bait is on the move and we should start to see it on the flats just about any time now.

Catch em up.
Capt Danny R. Guarino
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