Captain’s Corner: Dave Zalewski

The Tampa Bay Times

After many years of service we retired Lucky Too III and replaced her with Lucky Too IV. Long time customers from Kentucky joined us for her maiden fishing trip. We started out trolling within 1 mile of shore after leaving John’s Pass and were rewarded with Spanish mackerel of all sizes, undersized kingfish that were mixed in with the mackerel and numerous small bluefish. Small spoons coupled with either #1 planers or trolling sinkers were used with the aggressive mackerel often striking before the planer could even be set. Moving offshore and switching to larger spoons and plugs produced strikes from barracuda and larger Spanish mackerel on the two artificial reefs we stopped at. In addition to catching and releasing barracuda on the hardware, slow trolling live blue runners caught on site provided some memorable battles.
We moved on to the 65 foot depths targeting hard rocky bottom with small ledges scattered throughout and quickly realized that there was no need to venture any further offshore. Small gag grouper were caught on several of the stops we made and the lack of keeper gags was more than made up by the keeper red grouper, mangrove snapper, white grunts, porgies, hogfish and even a yellowtail snapper that were caught using pinfish, squid and shrimp for bait. A bonus kingfish caught on a stinger rigged Spanish sardine deployed on a flatline topped a colorful, multi specied box of fish. Not every day offshore is like this, but it was a great start with the new boat.

Dave Zalewski 460-9893