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Hooking Up Anglers Since 2011.
You can have some success catching grouper in my region by trolling lipped plugs in some of the deeper channels and holes around Tampa Bay, as well as along some of the nearshore hard bottom areas, but the majority of anglers who target these fish chase them offshore 30 to 80 miles. The best grouper fishing takes place in 120 to 180 feet of water over wrecks or hard bottom (rocks or reef).
The Gulf of Mexico is a really large area, so what a lot of guys will do is keep their bottom machines on whenever they’re running while watching for good bottom. The ideal situation is to find bait stacks or large schools of bait holding over these hard bottom areas. In a lot of cases the section of bottom is less than 50 to 100 yards wide—they’re usually pretty small, so you have to be right on them to see them.
Nine times out of ten the baits you’ll be marking over hard bottom will be threadfin herring, but it can also be pilchards or Spanish sardines. All those baits will work well, but what a lot of the captains in my area who target grouper will do is bring four to six boxes of frozen sardines and a livewell full of live pinfish.
If you find an area that hasn’t been pressured very much, you can usually get the grouper to eat the frozen sardines. Usually they’ll eat the sardines until you catch a bunch of them and then they’ll stop biting the dead baits, and that’s when you switch over to the live pinfish. If the spot is pressured from anglers on a regular basis, you’re better off going straight to pinfish. What a lot of guys will do is start with sardines, and if they don’t get bit, put a pinfish on one rod, just to see if that makes a difference. If that rod doesn’t get bit, then they’ll move on to the next spot. If they get a bite on the pinfish, then they’ll switch to using pinfish for bait.
Most of the spots out there are so small that the boats will anchor up on them instead of drifting. If you get a slick calm day you can drift fish, but the majority of the time you’re going to have to anchor up-current of the spot and deploy your baits behind the boat.
For tackle, most guys are using conventional tackle with 40 to 80 pound test line. A lot of people use monofilament instead of braided line. The predominant grouper species in my area are gags and reds, which are distributed about evenly in populations. Gag grouper are closed until July, but red grouper are open all year. Gag grouper average 10-15 pounds, while the red grouper average 6-12 pounds.
There’s still a lot of incidental fish that will be on those wrecks in April and May, so you want to bring along a surface rod to fish at the same time. There’s still a lot of cobia and king mackerel around during that time of the year, so you might as well put out a bait on a surface rod in case one of those show up.
Lastly, you always want to keep your bottom machine on and watch it regularly, even when running in. A lot of times you’ll run over a nice mark on the way in that you can save in your GPS, and then come back and check out that spot the next time you go fishing.
This Fishing Report was submitted on 5/5/2014 6:40:19 PM by Seamus and last updated on 5/5/2014 6:40:19 PM.
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