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How to catch Pompano
Pompano feed in 62–82°F water and bite best at 66–76°F. Fish Scouter's season calendar follows them in 16 waters; in October they are at their peak in The Panhandle, The Big Bend & Nature Coast, Tampa Bay & Sarasota and 10 more.
About
The pompano: gold and silver, a forked tail, and the best eating fish in the surf. Runs the beaches in spring and fall, feeding on sand fleas in the troughs.
How to fish it
Find the trough and the cut in the bar; fish the moving tide with a two-hook rig and a pyramid sinker. Or bounce a small jig along the bottom in the pass.
What it eats
Live bait for it
Sand fleas (mole crabs)On a small circle hook or a pompano rig, digger-end first — the pompano and whiting bait.
Live shrimpUnder a popping cork or free-lined, hooked under the horn on a #1 to 2/0 circle hook; on a jig head for the bottom. The universal inshore bait.
Fiddler crabsA #1 hook through the back corner of the shell, dropped tight to the piling — the sheepshead bait.What to fish it with
the sizes that fish itThe rule
not confirmed hereMinimum size and bag limit apply; confirm the current numbers at MyFWC.
The current rule →Where it is, month by month
Pompano are surf-zone fish that follow water temperature more than the calendar — the comfort zone is roughly 68 to 75°F. In fall, as the Carolina and north Florida surf cools, they slide south down the Atlantic beaches and pile up from the Space Coast to Palm Beach for the winter; Hobe Sound to Jupiter in January is the classic. On the Gulf side they move offshore or south into the passes when the water drops. When spring warms things back up they run north again — March and April on the Panhandle beaches and up to Georgia and the Carolinas by May, with stragglers to Virginia in summer. FWC's own study found a lot of the movement is inshore–offshore rather than a straight north–south trek, and that they spawn closer to the beach than anyone thought. Two runs a year, spring and fall, and a sand flea in the first trough on a moving tide.