Florida Fishing Forecasts

Florida is not one coast. It is three, and they do not fish alike.

The Atlantic side is inlet country. From Fernandina to Jupiter the ocean and the Indian River Lagoon trade water through a handful of cuts, and the fish stack up wherever that exchange runs hardest: the jetties at Ponce and Sebastian, the bridges at Fort Pierce and Jupiter. South of Palm Beach the shelf drops away and the Gulf Stream comes within a few miles of the sand, so a Gold Coast pier or a Government Cut jetty puts you in blue-water fish on an incoming tide. The Keys are bridges and channels, hundreds of them, and every one is a current seam between the ocean and Florida Bay.

The Gulf is a different animal. Tides there are small, often a foot or two, and some days the moon barely moves the water at all. What moves it is wind: a hard easterly can push a low tide out of the Big Bend flats and keep it out; a southwest blow floods the Panhandle bays ahead of schedule. A Gulf angler reads the forecast before the tide table, and our score weighs it that way.

Should I Fish? scores every town below, every day: NOAA tide predictions with each town’s offset applied, the weather coming in off whichever water you face, sun and moon, one number and a plain answer. Pick your coast. See when it moves. Go then.