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Boca Grande Pass, between Gasparilla Island in Lee County and Charlotte County to the north, is the name everyone knows - the fish stack up in the deep pass in May and June and the boats work it shoulder to shoulder.
Homosassa in Citrus County is the fly-fishing one, shallow and technical, and it made its reputation on record fish. Charlotte Harbor, Sanibel and the passes around Captiva all hold fish through the same months. In the Keys, the bridges from Bahia Honda down and the flats around Islamorada fish from March. Tarpon are catch and release in Florida unless you hold a tag, and a fish over about forty inches has to stay in the water.
Lee County. Twenty-five public ways onto the water on Gasparilla Island, fourteen on the Gulf side and eleven on the bay. The Gulf accesses are at 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 17th and 19th Streets and at Banyan Street; not every one reaches the sand, and some are viewpoints over the Gulf rather than a way down to it.
Open the guide →Lee County. Sanibel lies east and west where almost every other barrier island on this coast lies north and south, and it sits on a shallow plateau reaching out into the Gulf.
Open the guide →Citrus County. People have been coming to this spring since the early 1900s, when a railroad along what is now Fishbowl Drive would put passengers off to walk down and look at it.
Open the guide →Charlotte County. Not on the Gulf. This one is on Charlotte Harbor at 4500 Harbor Boulevard, which is why it has a boat ramp and a canoe and kayak launch as well as sand.
Open the guide →Monroe County. At 36850 Overseas Highway on Big Pine Key, open 8 a.m. until sunset, 365 days a year, for $8 a vehicle plus a 50-cent county charge a head. Three beaches, Sandspur, Loggerhead and Calusa, with the old Bahia Honda bridge standing behind them.
Open the guide →Snook sit against structure in moving water, so the inlets, bridges, jetties and passes are where you find them.
Florida calls itself the fishing capital of the world and it has the license sales to argue it.
Redfish, which the rules call red drum, are fished on both coasts all year, over seagrass, mud and sand bottoms, oyster bars and spring-fed creeks in the bays behind the beaches.
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