A few miles out of the pass, we ran over a huge school of bait in about 37’.
We had to stop even though we purchased an extra box of frozen LYs at Rocky’s earlier. Two of the guys fished with sabiki rigs while another fished with a homemade double-hook rig baited with small bits of squid. I used the dehooker to get the baits into the livewell. The sabiki rigs caught lots of cigar minnows until they became too tangled to use. The squid rig caught sandperch and a few cigar minnows, too.
With a full livewell, we headed to one of my old numbers that was in the 60-75’ range and circled around the area for a few minutes until the sonar showed a large arch hovering a few feet off the bottom. This would be our first spot, just a few hundred feet from one of my old numbers.
It was funny watching everyone bait their hooks with frozen bait after we just had caught a lot of live bait. Anyway, the frozen bait worked. The fish were hitting our baits as soon as they reached the bottom. A few large red snapper quickly came over the gunnels, followed by large gag grouper, and red grouper, some big enough to keep and some not. The old man who brought bananas on the boat against my advice had so much success here I had to name the spot in my GPS as the Banana spot.
My fishing buddies were giving me more opportunities to perfect the ikejime process on grouper and snapper. I’ll try to write more about my experiences with ikejime in another post.
At the first spot, I also dropped camera down to see if I could figure out what drew the fish to the area. The pictures showed some nice fish, but not much in the way of structure.
(Banana Spot Pics)
When the bite slowed, we watched the sonar as we circled the area and stopped about 200 yards away.
This was another new spot that I call Alive Bottom because it was covered in all kinds of soft corals. We caught many red grouper here, but they were small or too short and they were sent back to the bottom.
Next we headed some miles south to deeper water where I know the bottom is rocky. I hoped to find a scamp grouper.
Instead of a scamp, one of my buddies hooked into what seemed like a submarine. The drag screamed as whatever took the hook kept going and going. On the inside, I was laughing because I thought my fishing buddy was going to get to purchase a new reel. Eventually, whatever it was grew a little tired and after a bit of back and forth between the fish and fisherman, the beast came to the surface. It was an amberjack that must have weighed about 60 lbs. After a quick picture, the beast was released to torment another angler.
It was my turn to hook a fish. I was fishing using a chicken rig on the bottom which I baited with 2” Bonita strips in hopes of catching a scamp. A elephant-sized fish took my peanut-sized bait and ran and ran. Seemed like another amberjack. But because I am smart enough to use 40 lb. leader on the amberjack spot, the fish broke off, and I didn’t have to deal with it for more than a minute or two.
Next, we headed to the north to spots within sight of O-Tower in hopes of catching hogfish on my experimentally brined shrimp from the seafood market and my experimental hogfish knocker rigs. We caught a few white grunts, but only caught hogfish on video. I’m not ready to give up on DIY brined shrimp from the seafood market, but I need to make adjustments to my knocker rigs to prevent them from getting tangled as they drop to the bottom. Do any of you brine shrimp to make them stay on a hook better? What’s your process? Do brined shrimp catch hogfish?
Here's how we did for the day. The fillet table holding the red snapper is 28”x48” which means that all the red snapper were at least 30” long.
Click on these links to my Instagram if you want to see videos from the bottom:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRiDEQVE ... NiNmZ3Mw==
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRijGfa ... dwOXowdTNx
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRm0Sqs ... FwaW1pZTVk