Captain’s Corner: Jay Mastry

The Tampa Bay Times

Kingfish tournaments may have wound down but it doesn’t mean our season has.  A forty pounder won last weekends event and there were another half dozen thirty pounders on the leader board.  There’s been several years we’ve had some of our most productive trips on Thanksgiving Day and the weeks following it.  If weather allows near shore waters to clear, bait schools will be drawn practically to the beach and so too will the kings and mackerel.  Coming off this current new moon, we’ll have extremely strong outgoing tides in the mornings for the next several days.  I’ve always liked anchoring and chumming on these dumping outgoing tides.  It keeps fly-lined baits off the bottom and extends our chum line considerably further.  Silver trout don’t make a lot of “best bet” lists… but they can be a ton of fun to catch on light spinning tackle.  Any time now big schools of em’ will settle in on the hard bottom areas off Madeira and Redington beaches close to shore.  They will be in the schools of glass minnows and fry baits that gang up along the rocky bottom.  Diving birds can help you locate them and they will often show on your bottom recorder like a mass of bait.  We will often start just outside the swim buoys and drift out until we get them dialed in.  Silver trout are cold water tolerant and when you get in them good you can catch two at a time on tandem rigged jigs.  Store bought ones work great, I like to make my own.  A quarter ounce jig head on the bottom and an eighth above it allows for long casts to cover more ground.  A variety of soft rubber tails in assorted colors work.  White, pink, root beer are among them.  Experiment to figure what works best on a given day.

Captain Jay Mastry