Welcome to the July 2016 edition of Florida Shore Fishing Editors Blog. In this blog entry I am going to write about whats new here at FloridaShoreFishing.com and a brief preview of whats coming in the near future, but first, a quick story about one of my recent fishing trips.
Sunglow Pier – July 10th
July 10th is my birthday (que the music) and what better way to start a birthday than a trip to one of my favorite fishing piers.
Sunglow is located in South Daytona Beach and extends a few hundred yards beyond the beach into the Atlantic. It has a restaurant and gift shop on the pier, and I ALWAYS order biscuits and gravy to eat while fishing.
In the past I have caught many, many fish here. I have caught trophy sized Red Fish, doormat sized Flounder, Sheepshead galore, copious amounts of Black Drum and enough whiting to feed an army, so I had high hopes of catching a few fish while enjoying the start of my day.
I started out by stopping at Donald’s Bait and Tackle to buy a dozen Mud Minnows and 2 dozen live shrimp. The Mud Minnows stay alive for a long time in the surf and are a great bait for Redfish and Flounder, while the live shrimp are a killer for Black Drum and Whiting. With the bait in my modified cooler, I was on my way to Sunglow before sunrise!
After placing my breakfast order I made my way to one of my favorite spots on the pier durring the summer. Just beyond the gift shop is a small, covered seating area. At high tide the water strait down is about 5-6′ deep and is near the trough between two sandbars. I set up in this area casting a double dropper rig with 2 live shrimp into the trough and dropping a mud minnow strait down. I continued to use this same set up until the heat got the better of me and I left the pier around 11:15am.
On the double dropper rig with shrimp I caught the following:
- 6 Whiting – 6-11″
- 2 Black Drum – both around 12″
On the Mud Minnow I caught the following:
- 1 Redfish – Slot Sized (released to fight another day)
- 2 Flounder – both around 12″
While I did not set any size our quantity records it was a good steady day. I had a great time fishing, stayed in the shade most of the day and got a few tugs on my line!
Whats New at FloridaShoreFishing.com
- I have made is a priority to add at least 2 new bait shops to our list every week, and we are considering adding a featured bait shop for each region. I am currently testing it out with one of my local shops that I frequent to see if my readers like the idea.
- There have been a few behind the scenes changes that help the site run better and make it more mobile friendly. If you have any suggestions to make it even more friendly, please let us know!
- We are becoming more social! While we have always had social media accounts, we are starting to be more active on them. Got a question about anything, hit us up on Twitter or Facebook, we are there much more often now!
Whats Coming to FloridaShoreFishing.com
- More social media integration.
- Much of the world has turned to social media, and we cant ignore that, so we are looking at ways to integrate social media with our web magazine better.
- Provide valuable content on social media.
- One thing we have noticed that we are not big fans of is that MOST posts on Twitter and Facebook about fishing in Florida are trying to sell something and offer very little value, we are going to try to change that. Our philosophy is to provide informative, entertaining and useful posts on social media in hopes that it will draw in new readers and help grow this website. Our measure of success is the number of readers, not the dollars we generate (which is not enough to cover our costs, but this is a passion project, not a business)
- More first person articles
- We are running out of topics to write how-to articles about, so we are going to start writing more first person articles that will focus on our experiences fishing and what we learned on those trips. We will be taking trips with well known, and some not so well known but highly experienced anglers that will be highlighted in our first person articles. For the fans of our how-to series, fear not, we will continue to write them, they will just be a little less frequent.
- If you have a suggestion for a how to article, PLEASE find us on Facebook or Twitter.
- We are running out of topics to write how-to articles about, so we are going to start writing more first person articles that will focus on our experiences fishing and what we learned on those trips. We will be taking trips with well known, and some not so well known but highly experienced anglers that will be highlighted in our first person articles. For the fans of our how-to series, fear not, we will continue to write them, they will just be a little less frequent.
As Bugs Bunny says, “Thats all Folks”. I look forward to interacting with you all on social media!