We caught our live bait, mostly pinfish, in the grass flats on the north side of Dog Island. At our first spot for the big fish, we caught mostly smaller red grouper and a 20 inch red snapper. Not satisfied with that, we headed out further. We found a few really big fish this time. Unfortunately, they were mostly sharks, but a few red grouper and red snapper were mixed in.
We always try to bring up the sharks so we can salvage our 8 ounce sinkers. If you lose a few, it starts to add up. At one point, one of the guys pulled a big nurse shark close to the boat. Another guy reached for the leader. A touch of the knife on the taunt leader was all it took. The leader popped, releasing the shark. And somehow the sinker was released, too. It wasn’t just released, it was like it was launched from a slingshot—-SMACK—right into my buddy’s sunglasses
. Fortunately, the sunglasses were ugly and no real harm was done. 
To avoid the sharks, we moved. This time, we went to one of my amberjack spots. The sonar showed amberjack all over. It wasn’t long before we had a 35 inch amberjack to the boat.
By this point, I was using a lighter rod rigged with a chicken rig consisting of two 2/0 circle hooks baited with squid or small bonito chunks. I was hoping to catch some mangrove snapper. We could see a big school of them below the boat. I could feel tap, tap, tap on my line. Then something slammed my little bait chunk. It was big. The line tore off the spool and made the drag sing—zzzzz zzzzzz. After the fish began to tire, I gently reeled it up to avoid breaking my lighter line. The fish turned out to be one of the bigger red snapper of the day.
The fish above is a graysby grouper. Turns out, it was legal to keep, but since we didn’t know that when we caught it, we released it.
Nearly, all of the fish that we put in the cooler went through the full ikejime process. Although it was a slow day, we ended up with a lot of fish to clean. Here is the trophy fish pile:
