Contributing Writer
Capt. Gregg Mckee
Wildfly Charters
Let's start this month's column with something that might surprise a lot of you. The fishing in Florida is really better in 2026 than it was when I started my charter business back in 1995. While I do have a little bit of science to back up this statement, it’s mainly based on spending several thousand days on the water since I first moved here. Let me give you a few examples.
When I was guiding in Key West (‘95 to ‘05), catching a single bonefish on a fly was a good day. If you landed two or three bones, you were buying drinks down at the Half Shell Raw Bar for your buddies. The Keys were famous for these spooky fish but their population had been declining significantly since they were “discovered” by anglers in the 1940’s. I ran plenty of charters where they were just impossible to find.
On my last trip to Key West to visit my buddy and fellow writer, Capt. Mike Bartlett, we caught eight bonefish on a single flat before getting restless and went off to look for something else. This would have been astounding a decade ago, but now it’s the norm down there in the right conditions. Huge schools of bones are common in places that I never saw them when I lived in the Keys. Conservation of these prized gamefish, which have no food value, has paid off enormously. And this has happened with more guides and anglers chasing them than ever before.
If we jump up here to Pine Island, where I’ve been guiding full time since 2010, I’ve witnessed the same thing with our local tarpon population. Southwest Florida has always had a long history with the legendary Silver King of inshore gamefish. The very first tarpon ever caught on a rod and reel happened back in 1885 off Sanibel, an event considered as the birth of big game fishing in North America. This species is a big part of what brought me here full-time sixteen years ago.
The largest tarpon I’ve ever seen hooked all came from Charlotte Harbor, and these were fish in the 150-pound range. But it’s our population of juvenile tarpon, fish that are 30-pounds or less, that really have me glued to Pine Island. These are year-round tarpon that aren’t big enough to join the famous migration through the Gulf and Atlantic that the adults undertake each year.
The past few seasons have seen our juvenile numbers absolutely explode. Last year was a bit slower, but I still had several days around Matlacha in the late summer and early fall where my anglers never stopped casting to feeding tarpon along our mangrove shorelines. Hooking a half dozen on the fly can be a decent morning for the right angler in the right conditions.
I’m also seeing schools of tarpon pop up on flats and in backwater bays where I’ve never seen them before. The tiny fish in the photo is probably a year or two old, (tarpon live as long as humans) and was one of several hundred feeding in a creek way inside Pine Island a couple years ago. This is the sign of a very healthy ecosystem. If you listen to everything you hear in the local media about our area, you wouldn’t believe this is true, but it is.
Once again, I’m going to give credit for this success story to the conservation efforts of the local anglers and guides who pursue these fish, as well as organizations like Bonefish and Tarpon Trust (www.btt.org.)
That group has really done groundbreaking work when it comes to the science and understanding of mostly inedible gamefish only valuable to sportsmen. I just wish these non-profits would celebrate their victories every so often. It’s OK to spike the football and do a little end-zone celebration before you go right back to fundraising, which they also happen to be very good at.
As I'm sitting down to write this article in mid-February, our shorelines are currently loaded with a remarkable number of redfish of all sizes. Best of all, for every upper to over-slot red we see, there are another dozen undersized juveniles swimming right alongside them. I just spent two days fishing with a marine biologist who confirmed that this population boost was a direct result of the recent hurricanes and the amount of nutrients they introduced into the ecosystem. This has actually been studied for decades and his term for it was the "Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis." You can go ahead and google it if you want a more detailed smart person explanation. It's actually quite interesting and is a rare silver lining to hurricane season.
Our other Southwest Florida species, especially snook and seatrout, are in really great shape, too. I could go on for several more paragraphs about that, but I’m running out of room for this column.
Let me just wrap things up by saying that in my decades of guiding in Florida (and a few years down in the Caribbean), I’ve witnessed the number of boaters easily double, a major freeze and fish kill, an oil spill, several red tides and other algae blooms, non-stop development, and some really awful storms.
At the same time, I’ve also seen a gill-net ban, tremendous legal protections for our gamefish, a huge acceptance of catch-and-release among recreational anglers, the enforcement of it for tournaments, and a great business environment that encourages people to come fishing in our state.
Yes, we definitely have some serious water issues that are constantly in the media spotlight. Everyone knows this, and there is more work to do on that front. But for now, the good news definitely outweighs the bad in our part of Florida as far as I’m concerned.
Hope this helps cheer you up a bit and best of luck out there.
Capt. Gregg Mckee
Wildfly Fishing Charters
Matlacha, Florida
