Live bottom and hard bottom areas are covered in tomtates and cigar minnows. Large red snapper cruise above and through these bait schools. Here’s what it looks like:
Despite finding the red snapper, we could not get them to bite our live bait, which consisted of cigar minnows, sandperch, and pinfish, or our frozen LYs. Maybe the red snapper couldn’t find our baits in the midst of all the other bait fish swimming around. Maybe we were fishing at the wrong time of day, moon phase, or point in the tide cycle. Maybe the snapper were too full to eat another bite.
The red grouper, however, had no trouble finding our baits which were usually a couple cranks of the reel from the bottom. We could have sunk the boat with the weight of all the red grouper we caught. (Maybe they are overpopulated, FWC, and the season should be reopened.) One of these red grouper got sheared off behind the gills on the way up. It made a bloody mess of the boat.
Most of our red snapper rigs consisted of a 3-way swivel tied to the main line with an 8 oz. bank weight at the bottom and 4’ of fluorocarbon leader to the side. The chicken rig produced most of the lane snapper. A knocker rig weighted with a 1.5 oz. to 3 oz. egg sinker had the most bites and brought in the most mangroves. A 1 oz. weight was not enough to allow the knocker rig to reach the bottom in the current, but the heavier weights allowed the rig to reach the bottom and still bounce around. Our 150 gram Nomad Squidtrex jigs didn’t get a hit.
On the positive side, the mangrove snapper were hungry along with the lane snapper. Both taste great. Here is what we brought home:
