By Capt. David Lifka
mail@floridanewsline.com
It’s recovery time in the St. Johns River as it continues to drain all the additional freshwater from heavy summer rains received in the past weeks. Hopefully, we will finish the summer with a little less rain and our fishing season will finish where it started — with a bang.
Shrimping continues to be slow, but has steadily been improving. Good-sized shrimp are now being caught easily enough for bait, but five gallon buckets are happening with a little bit of searching. Doctor’s Lake and Mandarin Point seem to be the best locations at this time. Don’t be afraid to try various depths, shallow and deep, when trying to find them.
The croaker bite has also continued to be on the up, after a little bit of a slow down following some of our heavy rainfall. Good size croakers have been seemingly biting more on the shallow side of sandbars and points, rather than the deeper drop offs. Most likely they are just following the shrimp, and that is where the shrimp happen to be.
Redfish are bothered less by the abundance of the extra freshwater than some other species of saltwater fish. Docks and pilings should still be holding slot-sized reds, while schooling reds have been running the channels; unfortunately most are under slot. Whether fishing docks on a jig head or float rig, or the deeper holes with a bottom rig, fresh caught, live, river shrimp should be your bait of choice.
The recent slow down of the bite has made catching the tide at the right time a bigger factor. Fishing through the tide changes and waiting for the bite can sometimes be more productive than changing spots. Having to fish through the catfish and stingrays to wait for the right bite is usually a painful and boring process, but often worth the wait. When you finally find the bite at a certain tidal stage, more than likely that same bite will be back at that same spot, at the same stage of the tide when you return the next trip.
As long as we still have shrimp in the river, there is going to be a quality bite to be found somewhere. With autumn quickly approaching, we just need a little less rain to finish this year’s fishing season with the bang it started with. Let’s hope for the best.
Fishing Report: Shrimp are the best right now, as we are at what would be normally the peak of the season. Reds around docks and pilings, and croakers on sandbars or just off them. Sheepshead are a good possibility this time of year around docks and pilings.
Whether you catch one, some, or none, the family time spent fishing will last a lifetime.
Email your Catch of the Month photo to catchofthemonthpictures@gmail.com. Be sure to include the name of the person(s) in the photo, the name of the person who took the photo, the type of fish and date and location of the catch. We will select a photo each month for publication.
