Both of us needed a change of pace. So we booked flights on Allegiant, reserved a rental car and a hotel and packed the necessary gear. Certain times of the year, Allegiant flies round trip from Tulsa to St. Petersburg, and the flights are inexpensive ( $185-ish ).
True to form, this was a Spartan affair, with no frills or major luxuries…at least we weren’t in a tent this time! We packed our travel rods and reels in our Yeti backpacks and combined everything else into one duffel bag.
I used the Salt Strong app, Smart Fishing Spots and the Salt Strong Community for all of my research on what to bring and where to go. We decided that we would target Redfish, Snook and Speckled Trout, but in reality, we’d accept catching anything.
The weather was great and the fishing was better than expected. Doing our research and due diligence really paid off.
Since we weren’t catching much on the Gulf side, we opted to fish the bay off behind the main beach. Both of us love to wade fish, so this was what we came to do.
We had a great trip and all of our chosen gear worked perfectly. We mainly used Shimano Zodias 5-pc rods in Medium Light and Medium with Shimano Exsence C3000 reels. We were spooled up with 10 pound braid and 20 lb monofilament leaders. We threw 7gr-10gr jigheads with various plastic baits to great effect. We did bring TFO Traveler 3-pc rods as backups, but they seemed ridiculously heavy and unwieldy compared to the Zodias rods. They ended up being more of a nuisance than anything. But they gave us piece of mind in the event we broke a rod. I think that if we do another trip like this, we will each pack two Zodias travel rods, since they fit inside the Yeti Pangas.
Would we move to Florida just for the multitude of fishing opportunities? Hell no! Way too much traffic and way too many people. But the funny thing for us was that there were probably 20,000 people on the ocean side of the beach and we fished the back bay for two days and only saw one other person back there.
We will deem this a successful trip and we learned a lot. I definitely see us doing another trip like this.
Velox Seeker 