Tampa Bay fishing

Tampa Bay is Florida's largest open-water estuary: about 400 square miles of water that averages only about 11 feet deep, fed by the Hillsborough, Alafia, Little Manatee and Manatee rivers, with dredged ship channels up to 43 feet deep running up the middle. This guide splits it the way you fish it: inside the bay, along the Gulf beaches and reefs out to 20 nautical miles, and offshore all the way to the Florida Middle Grounds.

Inshore is the bay itself, from the head of Old Tampa Bay down to the Skyway and Egmont Key, plus the tidal rivers, Boca Ciega Bay behind the St. Pete beaches, and the passes that drain it: John's Pass, Pass-a-Grille and Bunces Pass. Snook, redfish and spotted seatrout are the everyday fish, on grass flats, oyster bars, mangrove shorelines, docks and bridges. Seagrass covered about 31,544 acres of the bay in the 2024 mapping. Know your boat's draft, stay in the marked channels and anchor on bare sand.

Nearshore runs from the beaches of Madeira Beach, Treasure Island, St. Pete Beach and Fort De Soto past Egmont Key to the north tip of Anna Maria Island, out to about 20 nautical miles. The shelf is wide and flat, charted bottom samples are mostly sand and shell, and the natural ledges are low, so most of the structure you can find on a map is man-made: county artificial reefs of Army tanks, barges, a tug, bridge rubble and culverts in about 25 to 50 feet, plus the shoals and channel edges at the bay mouth. This is mackerel, cobia and tarpon water in season, with grouper, snapper and sheepshead on the reefs.

Offshore starts about 20 nautical miles out and runs west across the West Florida Shelf to the Florida Middle Grounds, a field of coral-grown ridges about 180 km northwest of the bay. It's bottom fishing on wrecks, reefs and the Gulfstream gas pipeline for grouper and snapper, and all of it is federal water. Two federal closed areas lie out there too, and they show on the map: Steamboat Lumps, closed to fishing year-round, and The Edges, closed for part of every year.

Where this guide starts and stops

On the Gulf, the line in the north is The Narrows at Indian Shores, at about 27°50' N, where the National Weather Service's Tampa Bay waters zone ends and Clearwater Harbor begins. All of Old Tampa Bay is in. In the south, the line is State Road 64 in Manatee County, the same line FWC uses. Palma Sola Bay, just south of it, belongs to the Sarasota guide. The water north of The Narrows isn't covered yet. Past 60 nautical miles out, the offshore area runs north to 28°51' N and out to about 125 nautical miles from shore, so the whole Middle Grounds protected area and both closed areas, Steamboat Lumps and The Edges, are in it.

For snook, redfish and trout, FWC treats Tampa Bay as its own management region, from Fred Howard Park on the Pinellas-Pasco line south to State Road 64. It takes in the Manatee and Braden rivers but not Palma Sola Bay. State waters end 9 nautical miles off this coast. Past that line federal rules apply, and they can differ from the state's for the same fish.