WILD FLORIDA
WINTERTIME WADE FISHING FOR SEATROUT IN RECENT YEARS, IT’S THE MOST-CAUGHT INSHORE FISH SPECIES BY PRIVATE OR RENTAL BOATS
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Written by:Paul Thurman, Ph.D.
t was cold—at least cold for a Tampa winter in January. A front had come through a couple days earlier and an old friend had somehow talked me in to a wade fishing trip for spotted seatrout. Also called speckled trout, it is actually a member of the drum family and not the trout family. I couldn’t believe I agreed to it, but my friend’s constant badgering finally wore me down. Besides, who knows? I might learn something new and if we didn’t catch anything, he’d never hear the end of it. Basically it was a win-win situation, I thought. After a stop at the local bait shop to pick up a few dozen shrimp, we arrived at the boat ramp and suited up. Wade fishing was the goal of the morning; the air temperature
Most seatrout are not particularly large, although you can increase your chances of catching bigger fish by using somewhat larger baits consisting of or resembling fish.
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F LO R I D A C O U NTRY D e c e m b e r | J a n u a r y 2 0 2 1
was in the high 30s, so neoprene waders were a necessity. I tied my bait bucket to my tackle pack and began to wade down the flat in waist-deep water, throwing a popping cork with a live shrimp suspended a few feet beneath it. We were wading the edge of a drop-off from the flat into a deep channel that flowed a mile or two into the Gulf of Mexico, fishing in about 6 feet to 8 feet of water. After a sharp pop or two of the cork to cause some commotion, my bobber went down and didn’t come back up. A short time later, a nice seatrout was on my stringer. That’s how the rest of the morning went—one fish after another until all my shrimp were gone and I had a nice limit of seatrout. Time to go get some breakfast and warm up. It wasn’t even 10 a.m. yet.
