This is a very unique looking fish that is extremely beautiful. It was also very strong for it's size. I was sure that I had a bigger catch on, and I was quite surprised to pull up a fish that was this small.
As I have said in a few posts in the past, you really never know what you are going to catch when you go saltwater fishing. That can be a good thing and a bad thing depending on what it is that you actually catch. In this case, it was a good thing because I didn't pull up a shark or a sting ray, but you never know what you are going to get our in the saltwater!
When I go freshwater fishing, I typically only catch one type of fish. Bass is really the only fish that I go after, and the only other fish you can really catch using bait for a bass would be a mudfish, war mouth, or a gar/pike. Only the war mouth out of the bunch would be good to keep for eating, and mudfish/gar/pike are useless. It is fairly rare to catch another type of fish when you are using artificial bait designed solely for catching bass.
The only way you can really catch random fish while in the freshwater would be to use live minnows. In that case you could catch any of the fish I named above and catfish, speckled perch, or bluegill.
I prefer freshwater over saltwater, but both can excite me and I still definitely do a little bit of saltwater fishing.
Here is the pretty Jack that I caught on in Tampa Bay:
Stay High,