Fishing in general was so so - but I did find great numbers of snook on the beaches in the AM (they were there all day, but got lock jaw after a certain time in the AM - and were even pretty tough before whatever that magical shut off time was). The ones I caught were on what basically was a white/pearl saltwater version of a wooly bugger with dumbell eyes tied on a size 2 hook.
I also found good numbers of spanish macs around too - admittedly, the majority of the ones I caught were with spinning gear from a pier in Naples. However, I managed about a dozen or so on the fly while fishing some jetties/beaches (I only specifially flyfished for them on 3 occasions).
Add in a sprinkling of small jacks, skip jacks (aka leatherjackets) and believe it or not, a mess of small bluefish - and that rounds out the trip in a nutshell. So I can't complain of no action, but was slightly disappointed that the fishing wasn't quite up to the same par as last year.
Btw, most of the 20 or so bluefish I caught would've been labeled 'snappers' here in the NE...only 2 graduated to the 'cocktail'/2lb range...Evidently to fishermen on the west coast of FL considered the larger 2lbs to be large for that area (to be fair, the folks on the east coast of FL are well aquainted with the 'gator' size bluefish.
Just to fill in the blanks - this trip was to be spent partly on the east coast and partly on the west coast. However, we only stayed in Juno Beach one night because the east winds were bad and forecasted to stay that way...with rip currents, etc that would spoil not only my fishing, but my daughter's enjoyment of swimming/snorking (her style) along the beaches over there...so we lost a day and as far as I'm concerned, the real fishing took off when we hit Naples, then later on, Venice (last year I did pretty well from Juno Beach Pier with albies, cero mackerel, jacks and a lost nice sized king mack and was hoping for deja vu
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