Tide: -0.4ft at 5:30pm
Today Pat, Jeff, and I headed out to Sanibel for some late afternoon shark fishing. Jeff brought a variety of bait in addition to Pat's frozen mullet and jack. Upon arriving at the beach at 4:30pm there were quite a few snook cruising the clear water. The tide was so low the snook on the inside of the bar were pretty much stuck there until the tide came in. We made a couple casts but with 40# mono leader the snook would spook..so we started running baits out.
We had a stingray, jack, mullet, and a fresh cow-nosed ray I snagged on 9/0s and 12/0s. The cow-nosed ray got picked up after a while but we missed the hookset. The ray had blacktip sized teethmarks in it so not a big loss. It was already starting to get dark so we started casting for snook. Pat spotted a few big snook cruising close to the sand and after making a few casts he hooks one of the smaller ones on a white bucktail jig. He only had 20# leader so he let her run anywhere she wanted. We landed the 36-37" snook and just wondered how big the other snook was that was swimming with this one since it made this one look like a baby.
It was getting dark so we started packing up everything and reeling in our lines when Jeff's 9/0 goes off. Pat grabbed the rod, hit it for the hookset and we were on. After a few wrong guesses on the species based on the fight we land the 6'2" bull shark in 10 minutes or so..Jeff tags the bull, we get a couple pictures, and send him back to the sea. It was a rather slow night of shark fishing but with the high heat index I bet if we would've stayed past dark we would've had decent action. Today was the last day of Spring..Summer will bring great fishing as long as you can beat the heat.
