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Hooking Up Anglers Since 2011.
June is probably the best month of the year for snapper fishing in the Florida Keys. There’s a very good bite for yellowtail snapper on the edge of the reef in 50 to 70 feet of water. Anchor on the edge of the reef, and make sure there’s some current flow. If there’s no current, there’s no fish feeding.
We use lots of chum, often 25 pound blocks of ground chum in chum bags which we supplement with horse oats to draw the fish towards the surface. Anywhere up and down that reef line from Key Largo to Key West you’ll find fish.
I like using no more than 12 pound line. Clear Sufix 12-pound monofilament with no leader, a 1/16th ounce HookUp Jighead with a small piece of bait or silverside. The key is to match the drift of your bait with the drift of the chum, so if the current is really moving you might have to use a little heavier jighead. Freespool the bait back with no tension. When the bite comes the line will accelerate, and all you have to do is close the bail and reel the fish in.
We target mangrove snapper in the Keys a little shallower than the yellowtails, usually in 50 feet of water around rocks. You won’t find the good snapper around the sand and sea fans, what you want is hard coral.
You want to chum these fish with ground chum, but also with small pilchards or silversides. I like a ¼ ounce HookUp jighead for the mangrove snapper fishing, and usually bait up with a chunk of fresh cut bait like bonito, mullet, mackerel or pinfish.A lot of guys will fish the same areas, only at night, when the fish can’t see as well. They do that at the end of June and into July and August when the fish are spawning and schooled up in big numbers.
We find a lot of mutton snapper in our chum slick when we’re yellowtail fishing. You can’t see them because they’re down deep below the yellowtails, but you can pin a whole ballyhoo to a hook or jighead and drop it back and get a nice mutton or two. The muttons usually show up after you have been chumming for a while, so the longer you’ve been anchored up and chumming the better chance you have of catching a mutton snapper.
Another way to target mutton snapper is drifting over the deeper wrecks with a live pilchard, pinfish, cigar minnow—something live and wiggling. Mutton snapper are notoriously leader shy, so you want a long 40 pound test leader—say 40 to 60 feet long, to keep the bait away from your weight.
The average mutton snapper in my region is 8 to 10 pounds with fish to 15 pounds. Yellowtail snapper average two pounds, with a lot of three and four pounders, and anything over five pound is considered a flag yellowtail. Mangrove snapper on the reefs average three to five pounds.
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This Fishing Report was submitted on 6/16/2013 3:10:32 AM by Seamus and last updated on 6/16/2013 3:10:32 AM.
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