My brother and his family are down for Easter from Virginia, so my dad wanted us to go out and catch some fish while they were here. It almost looked like the weather was gonna keep us from getting out, with winds kicking up the Gulf, but yesterday was supposed the be only 2-5 foot seas, so we decided to take a chance. We (me, my son, dad, and brother) left the dock around 7:30am with a low tide, and got out to Stump Pass about 20 minutes later. It took about 5 minutes to slowly work our way through the swells and breakers built up in the pass and nearby sand bars, but once we got out into about 20 feet of water it wasn't too bad. The south wind was fighting the incoming tide a bit, so going out was slow, even in a 26 foot boat. We managed about 10-12 knots, and went out about 7 miles to some good hard bottom spots.
My brother caught the first fish - a little blue runner. We kept it for cut bait in case the 10 dozen shrimp gave out! I then brought in our first mangrove snapper, about 11 inches. Then my son caught a triggerfish, too small to keep. Then I caught another mangrove, a little bigger. Meanwhile, my brother was catching blue runners! He couldn't get a shrimp past the little buggers. Dad caught a couple of small grouper, and then he put a nice snapper in the box. Then I caught what is usually considered a real nice snapper, about 14 inches. We fished the spot for about 2 hours, and ended up with 15 snapper - 8 in the box, and 7 in one of the bait wells in case we had to cull the smaller ones. Good thing we took that precaution! We had also caught 10 or 12 undersize grouper, 4 undersize lane snapper, and a BUNCH of blue runners! We also lost 5 or six really nice fish that cut our lines, probably kings or big Spanish macks, and one my dad had hooked that we think was a BIG grouper.
We decided that since the bite seemed to be on, we would go out to a 10-mile spot and try it. We got there dropped a marker, and tried to anchor so we'd come back to it. Well, the wind and tide were playing tricks, and we ended up about 40 yards from the "spot" when the boat settled, but by then I had hooked another snapper! So we decided to fish where we were. We seemed to be in constant motion with the wind shifting and the tide changing, but we kept catching snapper. My brother hooked a good Spanish mack, but wasn't rigged for it and it cut his line right at the boat. So he put on a steel leader, just in case. My son fought something heavy for several minutes, but it finally broke the line. We threw back all the snapper in the baitwell, which were all under 12 inches, replacing them with fish 13" or larger. Finally, as we were thinking of heading in, my son hooks another big one. He gets him in and it's the biggest mangrove I've ever seen caught, just over 19 inches! We were down to using cut bait, pieces of blue runner and frozen herring, and we all decided to fish a little bit more! We stayed out until just about 1:30 PM, then came in and ran the crab trap lines looking for tripletail, but the water was too churned up closer in to shore. So we got back to the dock about 2:45 PM.
We ended up with a full mangrove snapper limit (20), with all but 2 over 13" (the first two I caught and put in the box, not knowing we'd catch so many!). We also had 2 decent Key west grunts. We caught a LOT of fish, and if we didn't have a limit I bet we could have come in with 50 or 60 nice snappers. We caught at least a dozen grouper that were just 3-4 inches too short, and one scamp that was almost 15".
Only pics I took were of the bigger snapper, with my son Justin holding the big one he caught:
That is a big grover
great fish!
While we were cleaning the boat, a lady that lives up the creek from my dad came by in her boat, and said she'd been up at the marina when one of the charter boats came in. She said they had a full limit of mangroves, and they were all over 20" long! My dad knows the captain of that boat, and he says he goes out 15-18 miles and knows where the really big "grovers" are! They sometimes go out at night when the moon is full and chum them up and catch them on free-lined shrimp and small pinfish. I gotta make one of those trips, because I'd love to catch a limit of those big uns!
