Snook and redfish stay hot as Sarasota-area tarpon begin fall exit

What's biting

What's next

Rick Grassett's outlook for the shop already points past this week: snook should keep moving away from passes and along the beach toward their wintertime inside-water haunts, staging around docks and bridges in the ICW and on shallow flats as the transition builds through early October.

The waxing gibbous moon, building toward full, should push bigger tidal swings into the weekend. The incoming morning tide peaks near 9:16 AM off Clearwater Beach and 11:33 AM off St. Petersburg, and the last two hours of that push are typically when the inshore bite turns on hardest, so trips timed to those windows are worth planning around. The evening low, falling between roughly 4:23 and 7:04 PM, sets up a solid secondary window on the outgoing side for anglers working passes and dock lines.

Tarpon should keep thinning through early October as Grassett describes, so anglers still chasing them should shift effort toward deep grass flats and bridge structure rather than the passes, where the bigger fish are already staging.

Context

Late September sits at the heart of the seasonal transition for Tampa Bay and Sarasota: snook are pushing out of summer pass and surf haunts toward the docks, bridges and backwater flats they'll hold on through winter, right on the typical calendar for this stretch of the Gulf Coast. The redfish activity captains are reporting in the bay is consistent with a normal early-fall pattern, and the tarpon exodus described locally — fish thinning out of the coastal Gulf as they stage before migrating away from the area — is tracking on schedule rather than running early or late. Water temperatures in the mid-to-upper 80s are typical for this time of year and should begin trending down gradually as fall progresses, which will accelerate the snook and tarpon shifts already underway.