Cape Coral team takes first place at redfish tournament

The finale of the 2018 Florida West Division of the IFA redfish tournament highlighted a fishery that is possibly in need of a rebuild.

Originally scheduled for Punta Gorda, the venue was changed to Ruskin on the south shore of Tampa Bay. The division brought out more than 60 of the best two-man redfish teams from the area.

In the end it was a pair of teammates who came with almost no local knowledge that came out on top.

“We weren’t even sure if we were going to fish,” said angler Nathan Harbord of Cape Coral. “My partner and I had never even fished Ruskin before. We did some scouting on Google Earth and looked for areas we thought would be fishy.”

Using their intuition, Harbord and teammate Warren Polhemus decided to make the trip up eight days early to see if they could find any redfish.

“We came up the Friday a week before the tournament and fished pretty close to the ramp. Between the red tide and the no fishing zone, we didn’t want to burn up a lot of gas looking around. When we pulled into the spot we found we saw 10 to 15 fish. It wasn’t a ton, but they were good fish, the right fish.”

With a maximum size limit of 27 inches in redfish tournaments, fish just under that size are considered perfect. On their scouting day the fish they were catching were just under 27 inches, perfect sized. With this knowledge they decided to enter.

On the day of the tournament they returned to their new found spot.

“It was an area you have to idle in, and we could see other boats were running to the spot,” Harbord said. “We decided to go to the main area first. When we pulled in and got the power poles down we got a 29-inch fish.

“We kept throwing along about 50 feet of shoreline and ended up getting a fish right at 27 inches. There was another boat just around the corner and we could hear them catching fish as well. There was a school of mullet pushing between us and it was like they would get a fish then we would get a fish as they bounced around.”

With fish around and eating, Harbord and Polhemus soon put another nice redfish on the measuring board that ate their Z-Minnow on a jighead fished bouncing on the bottom. It was again right under the 27-inch mark.

With their two-fish limit just about at the maximum size, they decided to protect their current catch and move for cooler water to keep them alive and avoid any potential penalties.

“We knew both fish were close and decided to go with them,” Harbord explained. “We still had more than four hours of fishing time left and didn’t want to take a chance of the water heating up too much or running into any red tide, so we basically sat out in the bay and kept ice in the livewell to keep the temperature down.

“I was insanely bored sitting there for four hours and probably checked those fish 300 times. I thought i was going to wear out the hinges on my livewell!”

In the end their decision paid off. At the scales their fish would weigh 7.64 pounds and 6.58 pounds for a 14.22-pound total, beating a second-place total of 13.49 pounds. Their total winnings were valued at $28,500 with a 19-foot Ranger boat as a prize.

Fifteen boats in the field weighed in two fish, while another 10 weighed in one. The IFA tournament schedule will conclude with the Championship held Oct. 26-27 in Hopedale, Louisiana.