Ock. Bay offshore

[grouperfever]

Tried it again Saturday 5-7 with decent success. The day started off on a sour note with someone being kind enough to empty my pinfish traps for me. They didn't even rebait them. Savages. No problem, a buddy of mine has a few more a half mile away. They were cleaned out as well. Luckily one of the traps had a tiny piece of bait left in it so we got about a dozen pins/grunts from pulling seven traps. Away we go to try and catch a few grouper. We headed SE to get a little deeper while staying inside the "magic" line in the event a gag showed up. Anchored on some good hard bottom in 45' and the bite was solid. Started with dead to get everybody downstairs woken up and then switched to live. Our first 5-6 pinfish were eaten by 18-19" red grouper. Beautiful, but short. Then I boat a 23" red grouper and my brother catches a 20" red. Thank goodness his measured, barely, because he wasn't gonna make it. I pluck a large grunt out of the bait well and down he goes. It instantly gets slammed and after good fight up comes a 27" gag. He was pissed because I fish with the drag on my Newell pinned down and he stripped line a few times. Within 60 seconds my big brother catches his big brother a 28" gag. So I'm happy as a clam and then in the next ten minutes I notice three things. The bite stopped, the tide went slack and our bait well was empty. We had dead so we could have waited or fished through the slack tide picking our way through grunts and sea bass but I was thinking about Miller Lites and fried fish. To the hill we went.

[grouperfever]

Sorry about the pic size. Click on it and it expands.

[Ranaman]

great job!!