In Shore
The fishing lately around Johns Pass has been very good. There’s plenty of bait in the passes bringing mangroves, mackerel and snook action. Hank Valencia from Deep Color charters was fishing under the bridge with his son this past week on an outgoing tide catching nice mangroves on an artificial shrimp. Devin Roberts, from Seminole, has been doing well on nice Spanish mackerel on the outgoing tide using free lined live greenbacks. It’s great seeing the mackerel action return to the beaches. Also, Devin and his buddy were catching nice snook around sunset earlier this week, free lining live shrimp.
Near Shore
Hogfish bite has finally started to rebound a bit on our 5 and 10 hour fishing trips at Hubbard’s Marina. On the private charters it has stayed steadier but all trips are starting to see more keeper sized hogfish. We love to use 20-30 pound super long floro leaders with super light knocker rig set ups or a light Nekid ball jig. Live or fresh dead shrimp is the best bait to use to get these great tasting hogs. The best advice is to fish down or feed the more aggressive fish before pulling out the hog gear, once the bite slows on a nice ledge or rock pile that is when you want to target the hogfish. Due to the hogs being very leader shy, smart and non-aggressive waiting till other fish aren’t biting is a great approach. You can also cheat if you’re impatient like me, by using chum like Aquatic Nutrition’s super shrimp you can feed the other fish and get the hogs chewing quickly!
Offshore
The deep water offshore fishing has really kicked into high gear! This past week we had two deep drop private fishing charters and they both did very well on big snowy grouper, yellowedge grouper, barrel fish and deep water snapper. We have a 63 hour offshore now and hopefully they are filling up on more big grouper too. Shallower in the 150-300 foot range the grouper bite in there is still going well too, the 12 hour extreme trips have been filling up on plenty of fat red grouper with some big gags mixed in and plenty of nice scamp grouper as well. Mangrove snapper bite continues to be out of this world and super aggressive. The pelagics are still very active too making it a great time to get offshore.
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