ST. PETERSBURG - While my fellow Arkansans endured cold and rain from Nov. 30 through Dec. 7, I waded around Tampa Bay in shorts.
The weather was 81 degrees and sunny. The water was 72 degrees, and if not for a relentless wind, it would have been perfect for a kayak fishing tour among the mangrove keys and grass flats near Fort DeSoto Park.
Bill AuCoin of St. Petersburg introduced me to this part of Florida during a media tour he hosted as a promoter for St. Petersburg/Clearwater. I learned a lot about inshore and offshore fishing in the St. Pete area, but a kayak outing near Fort DeSoto made the biggest impression.
One of our partners had a Hobie Revolution with its revolutionary Mirage Drive. We paddlers couldn't keep up with him, and his leg-powered Mirage Drive freed his arms to fish while the rest of us wrestled with paddles.
I obtained a Hobie as soon as I could.
On Dec. 1, Miss Laura and I returned with our 'yaks to Fort DeSoto Park.
The fort was established during the Spanish-American War to oppose Spanish warships from entering the bay from Cuba. Still in place are 12-inch howitzers, short-range, high-arc versions of the rifles that comprised the main batteries of the World War I era dreadnaughts USS Arkansas (which also saw action in World War II), Wyoming, Utah (sunk at Pearl Harbor) and Florida. Also present are 6-inch rifles similar to those that comprised the main batteries of U.S. Navy light cruisers in World War II.
Entering the bay against these defenses would have been suicidal. The water is less than 3 feet deep in many places at high tide. Wooden ships restricted to navigation channels to which the guns were already trained would have been blown to splinters.
Nearby, North Beach is always windy and attracts legions of sailboarders and kite surfers.
On the north end of the peninsula is the finest public campground I have seen. Despite intense use, it is meticulously clean. Campsites are close together, but intimate.
For $36 per night we got a site with electric and water about 40 steps from the bay.
Bathhouses have hot showers, washer and dryer. The bathhouses are cleaned daily, and campsites are cleaned as soon as occupants vacate. Cigarette butts and other detritus are not to be found.
One side of the campground accommodates recreational vehicles and travel trailers. The other side is reserved for tents and small campers like my Little Guy Five-Wide, which provided welcome respite from the howling wind.
Fishing conditions in early December are similar to autumn conditions in Arkansas, but it took me a day to decipher a pattern. I wanted to catch speckled trout, but they did not school like they do in the spring and summer, so they offered no visual keys. In fact, I feared they might have departed the flats for deep water.
Deep pits pockmark parts of the bay. They were created by naval aviators dropping bombs in practice during World War II. Redfish and trout hunker down in those holes on hot summer days, and I hoped they were still there.
AuCoin texted me a map showing pit locations. My Lowrance graph would help me find them.
At least, it would have if I had the time. That's a lot of water to cover, so I bypassed the sonar search and just started fishing.
I didn't catch anything for most of the first day, which I spent in close company with a pair of dolphins. The water was only about 2 feet deep, and they made a terrible commotion slashing about the shallows. They caught some pretty big prey, which they tossed high into the air with their snouts like cats playing with mice.
To alleviate confusion and indecision, I brought only a small selection of lures, including a few cigar type topwater lures and some slow-sinking, Mirr-O-Lure twitch baits. Fish didn't bite the hard lures, nor did they bite a variety of soft plastic, shrimp-imitating swimbaits on 1/8-ounce jigheads. They sank too fast in that shallow water and fouled in the grass.
Late afternoon found me at the far end of the key where a juvenile amberjack gave me a revelation. I've caught them offshore, but never inshore. Trout had to be closeby.
Conditions were identical the following day in which another pair of dolphins kept us company. I made one major change. I found a concentration of game fish chasing bait, but they wouldn't hit a topwater or twitch bait. My lightest jig was 1/8-ounce, but again, it sinks too fast in such shallow water. My equalizer was a Luck-E-Strike Scrounger jig. It has a plastic collar that makes it vibrate wildly, but also causes it to ride higher in the water when moving.
I added a Redfish Assassin swimbait, a soft plastic that is relatively light for its size with a large paddle tail that keeps the lure elevated when in motion.
Mullet jumped all around me, but other fish slashed at bait. I cast at a boil and got a blistering strike. The fish fought like a striper, leaping and surging against 30-pound test braided line and reversing my big spinning reel's substantial drag.
It was an immature snook, a highly prized fighter.
Two casts later got a similar strike, followed by a similar fight. This time it was a speckled trout.
You can't keep trout smaller than 15 inches, and you can only keep one longer than 20 inches. This 18-incher was a Goldilocks trout, just right.
I took it back to camp, where Miss Laura and I ate it for lunch. A redfish would complete an "inshore slam. It was not to be, but a trip in Tampa Bay with AuCoin did produced some monster ladyfish and sub-legal trout, as well as my first leopardfish, my first pufferfish and a sheepshead.
This modest success was important for me. I've had great days fishing those waters, but they were always in somebody else's boat, fishing somebody else's spots with somebody else's gear.
Solving the puzzle on my own, with my own gear, was most satisfying.
Sports on 12/16/2018