Embrace the Chill: Why Winter is the Best Time to Fish Anna Maria Island
It’s officially wintertime on Anna Maria Island, and it’s time to switch gears and start using different techniques to ensure that our fishing charter trips are productive and a blast for all the awesome families coming into town for the holidays! Just because it got a little chilly doesn’t mean that we stop running fishing charters here on Anna Maria; in fact, it’s actually the best time of the year to get your friends and family out on a charter fishing boat and load a cooler full of tasty fish. The reason why the winter months are the best months for catching “keeper” fish is that when it gets super cold we only target fish that we can keep. When the water is warm around Anna Maria we fish for all kinds of fish including snook, redfish, tarpon, trout, and so much more, but when the water gets cold, almost all these fish get harder to catch, and other species show up in abundance. The snook tend to leave the grass flats and go way up the rivers, creeks, and canals searching for that warm water; they tend to sit on the bottom of these waterways waiting out the winter until the water gets warmer. The redfish and the trout can still be around the grass flats, but they go super shallow where we can’t get to them. With those species being very difficult to target this time of the year, we put our focus into Sheepshead, hogfish, and grouper. These three fish are all amazing to eat, and they all put up an amazing fight and can be a fun challenge trying to get these fish off the bottom and out of the structure! Sadly this winter, we can’t keep the gag grouper, but we will still be targeting them and catching them in between hogfish and sheepshead bites.
Sheepshead Fishing: The Wintertime Favorite
Sheepshead are unique-looking fish with human-like teeth and black and white stripes. The Sheepshead invade the reefs, docks, and hard-structured areas like bridges, wrecks, and rocks during the winter months. There are a couple of different ways that we target sheepshead, and they are a fish that likes to eat shrimp, crabs, and barnacles. My personal favorite way to catch sheepshead is to go offshore a few miles or even into the Tampa Bay area and bottom fish the structure using little pieces of shrimp. The sheepshead breed when the water gets cold, so they are usually in massive schools on these reefs and can make for some very productive fishing and make our Anna Maria Island Fishing Charters a lot of fun in these colder months. Another way I like to target sheepshead, usually when it’s too windy to get offshore, is to fish docks and bridges. When we fish docks and bridges, I like to use live shrimp or little crabs and cast them up under the docks or up against the bridge’s fenders and wait for a hungry sheepshead to come out and nail it! Sheepshead have nice white filets on them that make awesome table fare! I will filet the sheepshead and make sure the filets are perfect and ready to be cooked. A very fun way to have the sheepshead prepared while you’re on Anna Maria Island is taking the fish to The Waterfront Restaurant on Pine Ave, they do an awesome “catch your cook” deal, and they do an amazing job.
Hogfish Hunting: The Thrill of the Catch
In my opinion, hogfish are the most unique-looking fish that roam our beautiful waterways. They are a bright orange fish with some fierce-looking teeth, and they taste absolutely amazing. Hogfish are actually my personal favorite fish to eat and one of my favorite fish to target due to how hard they fight. Hogfish can be a very hard fish to catch, and not too many people can catch them consistently, but I have a lot of confidence in my ability to put guests on hogfish. I’ve spent many days on the water dialing in these fish and studying the way they eat, where they like to hang out, and when to target them. My favorite months to target these fish are December and January when the water temp is around 60 degrees. I fish for these fish mostly with live shrimp and letting the shrimp sit right on the bottom of the seafloor until a hogfish comes and grabs it. I fish mostly around 35 feet deep when I target these hogfish around 6 miles offshore of Anna Maria Island. We catch all sorts of different fish while looking for the hogfish, and it can be the most productive fishing charter that I offer here on Anna Maria. The hogfish don’t tend to come much shallower than 35 feet, so whenever the weather is right we head off to target these unique fish.
Winter Fishing in Anna Maria Island: Book Your Charter Today!
Thank you all for reading what I had to say about our winter fishing charters on Anna Maria Island, and I can’t wait to put some of these strategies to work with you guys on the boat! Happy holidays from AMI Excursions!
