Snook can be found all over Southwest Florida, and snook fishing is our staple fishery. Everglades snook are fishable year round.
In the summer months, snook tend to make their way to the beaches, passes, and river mouths to congregate and spawn in the waters just off our coast. The nearshore waters provide perfect habitat for spawning as well as a great place for anglers to pursue them. When the conditions are right, we find snook crawling the beaches and shorelines chasing the schools of bait that show up in the warmer months. We usually target these fish with small baitfish flies, poppers, and gurglers over sand, mud, mangrove knockdowns, and/or hard bottom. 50+ shot days at beach snook are not uncommon.
In the winter months, snook have a tendency to move into the warmer backcountry waters consisting of rivers, creeks, ponds, and mangrove shorelines. The cooler temperatures force these fish to spend more time in shallow water, or near the surface to spend time warming up in the bright sunshine. This pattern is a fly fisher’s dream and makes for some of the best sight fishing that exists. On days where there is a hard North wind, the water gets blown out of the backcountry creeks and ponds and forces the fish taking refuge in these unfishable locations to work out into the bays and shorelines resulting in some of our most epic fishing days of the year.
