Snook Season Kicks Off Strong Across Sarasota Bay

What's biting

What's next

Grassett's October outlook, just released, calls for snook to keep moving off the passes and along the beach toward wintering grounds, staging around docks and bridges in the ICW and on shallow flats — live shrimp, pilchards, or smaller lures and flies should produce there. Today's tides swing from a morning low near 8-11 a.m. to a late-afternoon high around 2-5 p.m. across the bay's stations, so the last two hours of the incoming push into evening should be worth working as the waning gibbous moon keeps decent exchange through the cycle. Expect the current snook and redfish bite to carry into the weekend, with tarpon numbers continuing to thin as fish finish moving to protected water.

Context

This is peak timing for the Gulf Coast's fall snook run — the season reopened September 1st after the summer closure, and the following weeks typically produce some of the year's most consistent inshore action as fish stage before winter. Redfish activity in the bays is typical of this transitional period between summer heat and cooler fall water. Tarpon thinning out of the coastal Gulf is on schedule too, part of the annual migration that shifts fish toward more protected water through autumn.