Come To Florida Honey

Bull Red Fish, tons of Sea Trout, Snook, Jack Crevalle and its 85 Degrees!! All that and one of my best friends wedding. That was the plan for my 10 day trip to Sarasota. What actually took place was slightly less exciting, and included me passing out at the wedding.
The first day was spent getting a new battery for the 1987 Mercedes that we would be driving while in FL. Once that was taken care of we were able to hit the beach and catch some nice sized ladyfish. I also hooked some kind of Jack but it came off the hook before I could land it.
On the second day we hit some flats out on Long Boat Key and caught some lizard fish, definitely a new species for me and one that I could have gone my whole life without catching and have been happy.
Lizard or Snake fish are about what you might expect. They are long and skinny and have big toothy mouths like a lizard. They have beady little eyes and are aggressive as hell. I was reeling one in and another one latched on to its side and was shaking like a shark. I reeled them both in and luckily they came of the hook pretty easily.
I caught one sea trout and some other small fish in the same area but didn't get into any fish with size.
That was about it for the good fishing for the whole rest of the trip. A big weather system came in and mixed up the water for the next 3 days. We still fished but the wind was high and the water was really off color making fishing nearly impossible.

We rented kayaks on Thursday and paddled around for quite a while looking for tailing fish or any other action with little luck. We finally found a pod of lady fish but that was it. We did see some dolphins feeding as well as what looked like big snook chasing bait but couldn't get them interested. We also saw a couple of manatees which was cool.
Everything was caught on chartreuse and white clousers or decievers on size 1 hooks, the more flash the better. I tied on some shrimp patterns a few times but only caught smaller fish so I stuck to the larger clousers and decievers. I stripped fast with a slight pause followed by more fast stripping and that seemed to work best. We used floating and intermediate line with the same results.
The rest of the time was spent doing wedding stuff. I was a groomsman and passed out during the ceremony. That was weird.