I had a couple of good friends come down to visit all the way from NY to do some grouper fishing that they had been hearing me brag about, so the pressure was on. We had planned to fish as much as possible for the four days they were here and wouldn't you know it, the wind just would quit blowing offshore. After waiting it out Fri. and Sat. I decided it was Sunday or never, so we left the dock before daybreak eager to get out on the 2 ft or less seas that were forecast. YEA RIGHT! We rounded bouy 26 as the sun was rising over the water and was promptly greeted with some more of those steep 4 footers with whitecaps abound. I'm getting tired of fighting those things:) Talked with TK as they were preparing to move in a little closer as we put a few keepers in the box in 38ft on LY's. We moved out to 52ft and had a ball catching hungry grouper, both trolling and bottom fishing. The fish seemed to biting just about anything and everywhere. And the seas finally calmed down around lunchtime, to make for a nice ride home. We ended the day with 17 nice grouper, not bad for a boatload of Yankees
. The crew included 2 who had never been gouper diggin before and 1 10 year old.( he caught the biggest fish of the day, a 34" gag that I estimate weighed around 16 lbs)
We trolled several color variations of stretch 30's, catching fish on all of them, but the hot color seemed to be any chartruese combo. We used cut LY's, spanish sardines, and northern mackerel for the cut bait. We also used some hunks of fresh key west grunt cut bait, try it, you'll like it! The water temp was about 66 and clarity seemed to be good. Cuda "B" ran great and we finally got to go fishing after waiting for 3 days.
Ya gotta love it!
Capt. Jay
