Florida's speckled trout fishery is firing on every coast through May 2026, with Florida Insider Fishing Report captains telling viewers the statewide bite is the best they have seen in a decade.
Co-host Bri Gabrielle opened Episode 6 of Season 22 by handing the floor to Captain Jeff Paige out of Sarasota, who anchors the Stearns Central West region. Paige put the run down to a clean-water cycle stretching back almost eight years.
"Our trout fishing in the Stearns Central West region is always based on the quality of our water," Paige said. "The less red tide, the less sewage spills, the algae blooms or whatever, it's going to make that water be a little off, is going to affect our trout fishing first and foremost. Now the good news is we haven't had any bad red tide or bad water since 2018. Combine that with CCA's effort to release a bunch of fingerling trout just a couple of years ago, and the trout fishing is really good."
Paige's May playbook leans into surface presentations rather than the mullet-watching approach he uses through winter. He told viewers to look for pilchards and scaled sardines dimpling on top of the flats early - a sign trout are stacked underneath. Calmer mornings get a small Heddon Zara Spook Junior in chrome or bone; choppier days get the next size up for casting distance.
He also walked through a popping-cork rig that does not get enough credit on the west coast: two to four feet of leader under the cork, then a 1/16th or 1/8th-ounce jig head loaded with a three-inch white Berkeley Gulp shrimp.
"What the 16th does, Rick, is after you've popped that cork a couple times, it allows that shrimp to spiral down instead of just zooming down if you had a quarter or a 3/8 head," Paige said. "It gives it a slower sink rate. Gives that trout a shot at eating that thing a little bit better."
Top zones across the Central West right now run from Joe's Island to Emerson Point, around the newly reopened Midnight Pass in Little Sarasota Bay, and through Lemon Bay from Stump Pass north to the Blackburn Point Bridge. Paige's photo of the night was a 29-inch gator trout caught with longtime Florida Insider regular Warren Girle, who bills himself as 'the Aussie made himself.'
Captain Mike Anderson, anchoring the Casa de Vela Northwest region, doubled down on the celebration from Crystal River.
"Like Jeff said, we have got such great trout fishing right now," Anderson said. "Almost all the grass flats in the entire region from the south end to the north end, three feet to eight feet of water, they're all worth a look because trout are really, really plentiful. Best bite we've had in probably at least 10 years, I would say. It's absolutely been unbelievable."
Anderson's numbers approach is a paddle tail in pearl on a long cast, working the strike zone in the top 10 inches above the grass. For a trout of a lifetime in the 25 to 30-inch class, he switches to cut pinfish soaked along oyster bar edges, or a live pinfish under a popping cork.
Co-host Captain Rick Murphy, fresh back from a hunting trip in Bolivia, kicked off the trout segment with one of the more remarkable big-trout encounters in Florida Keys guiding history. Murphy described floating past a 33 to 34-inch speckled trout that had been flipped upside down by gas from a decaying 2.5-pound mullet wedged in its throat.
Murphy reached over the gunwale, pulled the mullet free and revived the fish - which he says remains the largest speckled trout he has ever held, and one he never had to cast for.
Florida Insider's broader May report also flagged a kicking kingfish run in the 20-to-60-foot zone along the beaches, a tarpon push building around Egmont Key off Tampa Bay, and an unusually consistent red grouper bite in 115 to 130 feet of water on the Northwest hard bottom.
Paige and Murphy will host an in-person Berkeley Tackle Talk at CB Outfitters in Siesta Key on Thursday, June 11, with giveaways and an after-party at the Daiquiri Deck.