This post is a little late.  5-5-2010. Tierra Verde Fl.

I went out with Alex and his friend Dave with Captain Tyler Kapela. Captain Tyler is a young but experienced guide. He knows the area around tierra verde like the back of his hand. Our goal was to catch a hoss redfish. We started the day catching bait. Capt. Tyler took one throw of his cast net to black out the live well with thredfins.

The Hook came out right after this picture. We decided now to take a run and catch some trout and reds.

We arrived at a flat and started throwing DOA paddle tails with 1/4 oz jig heads. Caught more than 15 trout, kept three for some dinner.

After catching more than enough trout we ventured on to Capt. Tylers famous redfish spot. We anchored up on a mangrove edge and started casting out chunk threadfins. We threw out some more chunk threadfins as chum and waited. With in 30 minutes Alex's reel started screaming. After a almost 10 minute battle with a large redfish in 2 feet of water, we boated a 40" 20lb redfish!

Alex was ecstatic as were the rest of us on the boat. The fish was huge, this was a mosquito lagoon red not a gulf coast red. After snapping more than enough pictures to document Alex's largest red, we released her unscathed. After calming down and high fiving we continued to fish. 15 minutes later Dave's drag started to go off. He grabbed his rod and held on.

Dave took his time getting this guy to the boat, thinking it may be another lunker redfish. He boated the fish and it was a large 32" red. Not quite the previus fish in size but a nice one no doubt.

 We snapped some more pictures and released this puppy to grow even more. After catching some nice reds a boat came through and spooked all the remaining fish so we called it a day and headed in. As we headed back in we stopped to fish a marina's docks for some grouper. We had multiple hook ups but boated only one. A nice little gag grouper at about 20"

We left Ft. Desoto Park Ramp at 7am ran to get some threadfin. Took a little longer to get the bait as they were not nettable. We had to throw sabikis so it took much longer than expected to get enough bait. We started off the day in my secret red fish spot where iv pulled out 40" red and many other over slot fish. But no one was biting we chummed up using  chunks of threadfins like normal but i guess the tide wasn't right. We decided to move to the skyway so we took the ride and i caught a nice 3 foot .

We continued drifting and had no more luck except we kept getting broken off by we assumed either bluefish or mackerel but we will never know.

We decided to take the short run through the bay to eggmont key as we had heard the tarpon were out in force. As we  ran to the eggmont we saw a tarpon head floating in the bay.

The Head was from what looked to be around a 180 lb Tarpon it was bitten in half by a huge shark. It probably was hooked and a sharked seized the opportunity

We reached eggmont key and the tarpon were rolling in force. There were pods of tarpon all over. With in five minutes the boat next to us hooked up and had an hour fight. We had no luck and went home before the storms rolled in Overall it was a great day on the water.