With light winds and calm seas, we were going further than I had taken the boat before. We were going to see what we could find beyond S Tower. I had no numbers. Just a feeling that based on my study of the charts that we might find some fish. Nonetheless, I was fearing the whole way out that we would burn a ton of gas and have little or nothing to show for it.
As we got within 3 miles of as far as I wanted to go, we slowed the boat down and carefully watched the sonar. Strangely, we didn’t see any of the snapper trees that I would have expected. The bottom was flat with little or no sign of fish. Then we see a little 2 ft. blip of fish and structure. We stopped to fish and caught nothing. Not a single bite.
Moving along another half mile, we saw more signs of hard rocky bottom and fish. It’s time to try again. As soon as the baits hit the bottom, we we’re getting bites. It wasn’t long before one of my friends was straining to hold his rod as he reeled in a large red grouper.
One of the other guys grabs the landing net. The fish, at least 15 lbs, barely fits. As the fish is being lifted out of the water, the hoop of the net breaks from the shaft. We now have a very short handled net, but it still works.
Within 20 minutes on that same spot, we were starting to run out of room in our 150 quart fish bag cooler. The drinks we were trying to keep cold had to come out. After another 10 minutes, we had our limit of red grouper. On the way in, we added three lane snapper and two mangrove snapper to our catch.
All of our red grouper were caught on live bait—pinfish, pigfish, or sand perch. The rigs we used were 8 oz. knocker rigs or three-way swivel rigs with 8/0 hooks. We used chicken rigs with 2/0 hooks baited with fresh never frozen shrimp (from the seafood market) for the mangroves and lanes.
What a great day with friends.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
