On Wed, 28 Oct 2015 14:10:26 -0700 (PDT), "John H."
wrote:

On Wednesday, October 28, 2015 at 2:04:22 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Wed, 28 Oct 2015 13:16:07 -0400, John H.
wrote:

Live shrimp were always my favorite inshore bait in
Florida...all the fish seemed to like them, they were cheap, easy to put
on the hook, and if you did it right and were freelining, they'd swim
until someone gulped them down. They were a $1.25 a dozen when we lived
in Florida.

Other than grass shrimp, which are great for perch, spot, and croaker, I don't think
I've ever seen live shrimp for sale in the Bay (Chesapeake, not Tampa)! The Tampa Bay
inlet was a great place for catching trout on shrimp.

Fishing down at the Skyway is always going to be a crap shoot. You
never know what you will catch. If it swims in the sea, it might be
there.
I really liked to wade the grass behind O'Neils when I was a kid
throwing a buck tail. My grandfather went there because it was before
the toll booth ;-)
You could get enough trout and red fish to feed the neighbors in an
afternoon.

Is the 'Skyway' the bridge over the inlet? I seem to remember it was 'Sky...'something. This was back in early '70's. Anyway, we'd pull into a park, I think, at the southern end of the bridge and walk out into the water. Always caught a few trout on shrimp we'd buy on the way over. We were both students at U Tampa at the time. That's when John Matuszak and Freddie Solomon were the big shots on UT's football team.

Yup, that is the skyway. You must have been coming down the east side
of the bay to Tiera Ceia (closer to Bradenton) to be at the south end.
My grandfather lived on the south side of St Pete so it was a quick
hop to the north end of the bridge. If you ducked into O'Neil's you
dodged the toll booth.
In the early 70s, that was the old bridge before it was knocked down
by a freighter. Now they have a new bridge and the old one is a
fishing pier. I have never actually been on the pier but I drive over
the bridge pretty often and see lots of folks fishing.
There are lots of recreational opportunities on that causeway, I just
don't live close enough to use them.
My condo was on the water in Treasure Island so we had beach and bay
fishing right there.