Last trip before Christmas Day, (and a day off)
I had a regular customer who likes to fish by himself. I guess that way he gets to catch all the fish. We went to a reef called Western Dry Rocks to get live ballyhoo baitfish to slow troll along the reef.
I had not fished to the west in over a week
Mainly because the fishing had been easy right out front of Key West. We have been catching plenty of Snapper and mackerel and an occasional grouper. you never leave fish to find fish, so we have been fishing at Eastern Dry Rocks and Rock Key reefs a lot lately. I had a report yesterday that there was a ton of bait at Western Dry Rocks and that there was a lot of fish chasing them. I figured it was a good time to try a different place.
The Bait was easy.
We caught more bait than we would need in one throw of the cast net. it looked like it was going to be an easy day……at first. I slow trolled around the area where we caught the bait. We did get some bites, but a lot of them were short strikes and we did not hook the fish. For the amount of bait that was there, there should have been more fish. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I trolled around both shallow and deep, but we really were not getting the bites I expected. We did catch and release 4 large barracudas. They are always fun on light spinning tackle and my angler did a great job fighting them. But still, all in all, it was slow.
It was a 6 hr trip, fortunately, so I had time for a “Plan B”.
With a couple of hours left, I had my mate pull in the lines and we ran east. I had an area that can be good for Mutton Snappers this time of year. It was about a 4-mile run. But it quickly proved to be worth it. We caught 5 mutton snappers in all. (3 were “Keepers”) and some nice Yellowtail Snapper to go along with them. We ended up with our limit of snapper by the time we headed in. We had to work for it a bit today, but it ended up well