I've been fishing for several years at Snook Islands without catching any snook. Snook Islands is an artificially created achipelago of small mangrove islands and rocky reefs near the intracoastal waterway at Lake Worth. I believe these islands and reefs were created to mitigate the loss of natural habitat in the area that's occured over the past hundred years or so. Both shorelines of Lake Worth are highly developed, so there's very little in the way of structure to attract fish. Also, native seagrasses are almost non-existent. I think the name "Snook Islands" was initially more aspirational than descriptive--it was hoped that creating them would cause snook to congregate there. The project was years in the making and it appears finally to be complete. After my experience there yesterday, I can say that perhaps the place is becoming worthy of its name.
I arrived around 10:30 a.m., a couple hours after high tide. There's often a strong southeast wind blowing across the ICW that only increases as the day goes on. Between the wind and the turbulance caused by boat traffic out in the channel, the conditions on the water are often less than ideal for kayakers. Yesterday, however, there was hardly any wind and minimal traffic.
Once I passed beneath the Lake Ave bridge I came upon a boardwalk built out from the shoreline. I began casting a gold spoon beneath the boardwalk around the support columns. Within a few casts I hooked and released a small cuda. It's always good to get the skunk out of the boat early.
I was seeing lots of mullet activity in and around the islands and reefs. In my experience, seeing mullet doesn't necessarily mean lots of fishing action--these mullet are too big to be eaten by snook, redfish, sea trout and other fish you'd be happy to see at the end of your line. But yesterday I thought maybe if there's lots of mullet around, there'll be smaller baitfish as well. I came up on the first couple rocky reefs and threw my spoon toward one of them. On one of the retrieves I got a solid strike. The fish stayed down and pulled hard. It felt like a jack crevalle, and after about five minutes of me trying to pull it to the surface, that's what it revealed itself to be. I know jacks can get upwards of thirty pounds. This guy was only three or four. But the hook point of my spoon had gotten lodged so tightly in this fish's mouth that in extricating it with a needle-nose pliers, the spoon got bent in half. Jacks are pretty tough, and this one swam away quickly, but my gold spoon was now unusable.
I happened to have a spare and tied it on the end of my line and continued to work the islands and reefs northward up along the west shoreline of the ICW. At the tip of one of the reefs I hooked something that swirled and jumped. I could see the black lateral line along its flanks and so knew it was a snook. It was somewhere between 20 and 25 inches, not as big as the snook I was catching a few weeks ago at Jonathan Dickinson State Park, but a good enough fish for me. Unfortunately, it had swallowed my gold spoon deeply and I had to set the fish on my lap to extricate it. Probably the fish would have been better off if I had just left the lure in its mouth, where it would rot away fairly quickly. But I didn't have any more gold spoons, and well...sorry to say, but even though I released that snook, I have a feeling it didn't survive the experience.
I caught two more snook, maybe a little smaller than the first one, before I reached the northern tip of the line of islands and reefs. I must say, there are a lot of them. So there's now plenty of places for snook to hang out in that area.
For a short time I switched from the spoon to a Mirrodine suspending twitchbait, which snook in other places have seemed to like. I did have one fish, probably a snook, attack it close to one of the reefs. But the water in the Lake Worth Lagoon yesterday was pretty murky, and I felt the gold spoon was creating more flash and was thus more visible to the fish. So I switched back to that after I had turned around and headed back toward the Lake Avenue Bridge.
By then, the tide had turned and the water around the islands and reefs got pretty shallow. I fish from a Hobie Pro Angler with Mirage Drive. The fins of the Mirage Drive extend about 18 inches below the hull of the kayak and there were lots of places where the fins struck bottom; so I mostly fished the somewhat deeper water on the eastern side of the islands and reefs, closer to the boat channel. I figured with the dropping tide, the action was over for the day. But I did catch one more snook one my way back to the boat ramp.
There are days when I catch half a dozen largemouth bass in four hours of fishing and consider it only an "OK" day, nothing spectacular. Yesterday I caught six fish and was very happy, especially since four of them were snook. I guess it's a question of expectations.
I'll be going back to Snook Islands tomorrow. My goal will be to catch at least one snook on fly tackle. Conditions are supposed to be similar to yesterday but with an even more favorable tide pattern.
No video of yesterday's trip. I really didn't expect it to turn out as well as it did.
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