The Southbound had Two Half Day Trips Today
Personally, I prefer the longer trips, but fishing has been good so I figured we could put a catch together in a 4 hr trip. I was half right. I only had two anglers in the morning. A father and son. I suggest we take the time to get live bait the same as we do on the longer trips. It has been working very well and I thought it would be worth the time spent to get it. It’s a bit of a crapshoot on a 4 hr trip.
Some days the bait comes very quickly and some days it can take an hour. Some days you spend the time and you don’t get any. Spending an hour is fine on a 6 or an 8 hr trip, but when you only have a few hours to fish, you can’t spend a lot of time getting bait. Today it came pretty quickly. We probably spent 20 minutes and my mate threw the cast net once and we had over 100 live ballyhoo. That was a good start.
We pulled the anchor
And started to slow troll the live ballyhoo around the reef. Over the last few weeks, we have had consistent catches of Cero mackerel, Yellowtail Snapper, Mutton Snapper, Barracuda, and Grouper. Usually, the bites come fairly steady. Not today. We were not getting as many bites as I had hoped for and many of the bites we were getting were short Strikes. Just the tail bit off and never hooked the fish. I worked two different reefs and we only put a couple of Cero mackerel and Yellowtail in the boat. We did manage to release a nice barracuda on 20lb spinning tackle. That was a good fish.
The water on the reef was not as clear as it has been so I moved out the outer bar. That is a secondary reef south of the main reef. Yesterday we got a nice Bull dolphin out there so I was hoping we could get lucky again. Even if we didn’t get any dolphin, there are usually Kingfish and barracudas around out there. Today was not usual. We got more short strikes and on Cero mackerel. I wish I could have stayed a little later, but We had a second trip so we headed in with a few mackerel and a few Yellowtail snappers, and one barracuda release. A tough morning for us. From the radio traffic I heard, everyone else was having a tough day too. Some days fishing is just not good
In the afternoon
I did not want to go back to the south side. We had a tough morning and I did not want to repeat it. A couple of boats went into the Gulf of Mexico, but they reported the watercolor was not good and the fishing was slow there too. I have a couple of spots in shallow water that can produce some good fish if the conditions are right. It would not have worked this morning, the tide was going the wrong way. But this afternoon, the conditions would be right so I figured we’d give it a try. We still had live ballyhoo leftover from the morning which is an advantage. We anchored at the first spot and caught a “keeper” red grouper pretty quickly.
We were getting a lot of bites, but missing quite a few. We did manage to catch a couple of nice Mutton Snapper and a surprisingly large Yellowtail snapper for the shallow water we were in. The fish of the day was a 35lb Kingfish or King mackerel. The Biggest Kingfish I’ve seen in weeks. All in All, we were putting a catch together.
https://oldsaltfishing.org/prepare-king-mackerel-5-great-ways/