Wildfly Charters
Capt. Gregg Mckee
January has never been my favorite month to fish around Southwest Florida for several reasons. The regular cold fronts and negative low tides are not your friends when you spend all your time in shallow water.
This is the time of year when a lot of my favorite redfish flats around Pine Island are actually dry ground for several hours each day. Mid-December even gave us some of the lowest tides I've ever seen with a couple days of incredible -.7 lows in the mornings off Matlacha.
If you're new to the area and not up to speed with tide charts, that means we were missing almost a foot of water beyond the normally observed low tide for this area.
Throw in a strong north wind after a cold front and you can almost double that number. The water is also on the chilly side for us; low 60s is the average, and that makes some of our species a bit sluggish in the mornings.
On the plus side, the water is beautifully clear in a lot of places, especially Charlotte Harbor. Since I really love sight fishing on the big sandbars up there, the opportunities to do that more than make up for the days of tricky weather and tides we have to endure.
Floating over the bright sand in just a few feet of water is the closest you'll get to Keys or Bahamas style fishing in this part of Florida. You won't be spotting any bonefish this far north, but there's a real variety swimming around the shallows right now.
On a charter early last month, I took one of my local anglers up to Charlotte Harbor from Matlacha and the 65-degree water was clear enough to read a newspaper laying on the bottom.
Within 15 minutes, we had shots at several small schools of redfish, quite a few pompano, and even a handful of elusive permit. We also had a constant parade of big ladyfish ripping across the sand, and it was a chore to keep the flies away from them.
was so impressed with what we saw up there that I went back on my own the next morning and just drifted over the sand without making any casts. I wanted to see how many species I would spot, and how they would react to the skiff without the commotion of having an angler onboard.
It was a great way to spend an hour and if you have a boat or kayak of your own, I really recommend you try it sometime. You don't even have to get up early since the best visibility happens after 9AM this time of year.
The Burnt Store sandbar is miles long and a great place to start if the winds are light and blowing from a southerly direction. No matter what location you choose, if you don't spot anything after five minutes, crank up and move a short distance.
If you find a section of sandbar that has a lot of stingrays on it, stay put. Interesting things almost always follow them this time of year. Stingrays are crab eaters, and so are the permit and cobia that will hang with them. These two highly prized species are common out in our deeper waters, but a lot harder to spot on the flats.
A really big stingray, I'm talking doormat size, can sometimes have several gamefish right on its back, waiting for some kind of crustacean to be flushed out of its shadow. On my solo drift last month, I spotted a huge southern ray being followed by a pair of speckled trout that were so big I mistook them for legal snook at first.
The best thing you'll take away from an hour of drifting in the right location is seeing for yourself just how great our water is doing these days. I'm especially pleased with how much of our damaged seagrass has returned.
And let's go ahead and spike the football now that Hurricane Season 2025 is officially over and we made it through without a single storm touching the US. (The forecasters got that one really wrong.)
You might have to bundle up and watch your depth gauge carefully some mornings this month, but I have a feeling it's going to be decent and short winter for us.
Best of luck out there.
Capt. Gregg Mckee
Wildfly Fishing Charters
Matlacha, Florida
