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Pitting Yourself Against the Supreme Gamefish Adversary: Winter Fishing for Florida Billfish

In Florida, winter delivers an opportunity that most of the country’s anglers experience only in daydreams. It opens the season for stalking the ultimate adversaries, the world’s most sought-after gamefish—the legendary sailfish and marlin. Billfish are legendary for a reason, and fishing for them is no joke. You’ll need to be prepared, so pick up some performance fishing shirts, do some stretches, take a deep breath, and strap in for the ultimate fishing experience.

Performance Fishing Shirts

Preparing Yourself for a True Angling Test

Pitting yourself against billfish is a whole different animal than hitting the edges of weed beds for largemouth or pulling flounder from a pier. If spending 8 hours under the unrelenting Florida sun stalking a massive, powerful fish with a sword for a nose and fighting it to exhaustion sounds like a good time, you’re in the right mindset. The physical preparation should include having more food and water than you think you’ll need, sunscreen, and the right apparel for the occasion.

Dressing the Part

Winter in Florida can be a bit of a mixed bag. The conditions are often sunny and beautiful, hence the migratory snowbird population. However, it is still winter, and surprisingly chilly cold fronts can still blow through. While Florida’s winter is known to feature sustained dry spells, it can also bring heavy rain. If it sounds like you should prepare for anything on the water, that is the idea. No angler in Florida should be without high-performance fishing apparel, including professional-grade fishing shirts. High-performance gear should provide full coverage to protect your skin from direct contact with UV rays. It should also be lightweight and breathable enough to keep you cool, designed to wick away moisture and to dry quickly.

Reading the Water, Stalking the Quarry

Once you’re fully suited up and kitted out with the gear necessary to brave a winter excursion after Florida’s marlin or sailfish, you need to find them. While sailfish and marlin can be caught year-round off Florida’s coast, winter drives populations of them to those warmer waters. The seasoned veterans of Floridian billfish angling swear by hunting the borders of the cooler green waters flowing down with north currents. When you find where the water transitions from green to blue, start hunting. Consider small bonito or bonito strips for sailfish and marlin.

Digging in for a Hell of a Fight

Finally, when you get a fish on, it’s time to strap in, dig down, and prepare for a hell of a fight. It’s not just the reel-stripping, drag-screaming, adrenaline-flooding acrobatic opening salvo to consider. You’ll have to stay focused and committed when that first adrenaline rush has been washed out, and you have 15 or 20 (or more) minutes of fight left. Stay with it. It will be worth it.

About Gillz®

Since Kent Hickman can remember, he’s loved fishing. Being a Florida native, there was certainly no shortage of access to world-class fishing for him growing up, and Kent took full advantage of those opportunities from the start. In adulthood, his love of angling inspired Kent to fish the tournament circuit professionally. However, he ran into a problem: the conditions professional anglers faced on the water could be unforgiving, and Kent had not found any fishing apparel capable of standing up to the challenge. Hard-core anglers, professionals or not, need gear that keeps them cool, dry, and always comfortable. They need gear that provides protection from both the elements and the unrelenting heat and UV rays of the Florida sun. In response to this shortage of options, Kent met the challenge himself. In 2009, Kent Hickman founded Gillz® to provide devoted anglers with high-tech, high-performance, professional-grade, and always stylish fishing apparel. That apparel includes shirts for fishing, fishing masks, hats, accessories, and more.

Stay on the water longer, fish more, and play harder with Gillz® gear at Gillz-gear.com


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