With the word on the street that the pompano are running down south, we decided to go see for ourselves. We started off looking for clean water at Spessard Holland, but the water just wasn’t what we hoped for, so we pushed south to Ponce de Leon, only to find the same situation there.

We finally found cleaner water at Bonsteel Park, but so did everyone else. Starting our day at the crack of noon didn’t play into our favor when staking out a good spot to fish. It was busy to say the least. Twelve and fifteen foot surf rods lined the horizon from both directions. Since I didn’t feel like walking a mile to find a spot to fish, we pushed farther south, just south of the inlet thinking it would be clean there, too, but to my surprise, it wasn’t. The thought was then to go find a piece of beach all to ourselves, which lead us north back to Ponce Deleon.

As we approached the beach, a couple other anglers were leaving and said they didn’t have much luck. We set up shop anyway. The tide was going out, which played into our favor. From recent reports the bite seems to be a little better with a falling tide. Within just a few minutes we were catching fish. I would love to tell you they were all pomps but it was just an active afternoon of all kinds of species. We caught black drum, sharks, croakers, pompano, whiting, etc. Really, that’s all I wanted to do anyway was have some good laughs with my boys and bend a rod hoping to bring home a few fish for dinner — and we did just that. What am awesome day!