The winds howled the last few days here in key largo florida fishing. Gusts up to 25 mph! We decided to take a run back to the cape area to get out of it. One nice thing about my comfortable 20′ seacraft is you can still make it to the cape and anywhere in the backcountry or bay and have a nice time. It doesn’t pound, slap, or spray you terribly – you can’t say that about many smaller skiffs and such. Once we got back around ‘the corner’ things were nice and we were in the lee of the wind. Our first stop for our january key largo fishing trip was in a creek that the water had been falling out of and left very low tide. The bugs had other plans and drove us right back out, so we worked the outside shorelines. This proved a good thing as we caught 3 big snook up to 13 lbs jigging shrimp on the sandbars. After about 10:00 or so we tried the creek again, now the sun had come up and wind swung around a bit, so the bugs were gone. We picked away at plenty of redfish, small black drum, and sheepshead. Redfish in key largo is a good bet in the winter time. We worked our way further in and continued doing the same, though we did get lucky and catch this huge ~20 lb black drum. We had to motor after him down the creek as he almost got around a bend on us!!! We moved further back and found some nice trout too. Around noon we headed back towards home and stopped in a channel for some rod bending action, which we had – plenty of trout, ladyfish, and jacks for 45 minutes before calling it a day. A great way to spend a 20mph windy day key largo fishing in january!!!
