Winter Fishing, 12-22-2009

What do you call 40 degrees, wind from the North, manageable seas, and chewing fish? Yep, you guessed it, classic Central Florida winter fishing. What we do is watch the weather forecasts looking for a day that offers seas calm enough to venture out. Most of the time the Winter seas off the East Coast of Central Florida are too rough to fish in our small boats. This is due to those cold fronts that you folks up North send our way after they have made your life difficult. While we don’t get snow and freezing temperatures as a result of these fronts. we do get wind and waves. Fortunately, there can be one day between the fast moving fronts that is calm enough to allow us to get out and fish. You might be asking yourself why we bother to fish when its cold and the seas are rough. The answer is this is the best time for catching American Red Snapper and Grouper. These fish move in to shallow reefs off our coast in the winter. This movement congregates the fish in small known areas. There are also fewer small fish for the target species to eat. When you put more hungry fish in a small area you get competition among the fish and that makes catching very good. You can always go fishing, but timing is everything when catching is the goal.

This year getting out and catching these tasty bottom fish is paramount. That’s because we will not be able to catch and keep them after 1-4-2010. The Imperial Federal Government has closed the season for Grouper beginning New Years Day, 2010 until May, 2010. They also closed the season for American Red Snapper beginning 1-4-2010. If that’s not enough to ruin our day, they are working on closing all bottom fishing from off our coast from 90 ft deep on out. In my last Blog I mentioned that we are putting together an online petition and email blitz to fight the closures. That is in the works and I will be doing a Blog asking for your help in a few weeks.

It was cold and a little bumpy on the way out Tuesday, but the trip was well worth the effort. The fish were chewing and the crew aboard the Lady Jane put their skills to work. Tuesday’s Crew  was Terry Winn and his wife Tamithia Winn. By the way, Terry is our fishing club President. I may have mentioned in a previous Blog that I am a member of a local fishing club, The Central Florida Offshore Anglers CFOA. Don Newhauser and I completed the foursome. The big deal of the day was that Tamithia Winn set a new club record for the biggest (ever) Grouper catch with her 48 pound 8 ounce Gag Grouper.

Congrats Tamithia on the catch of a life time. Of course, I will claim some credit for putting you on the fish LOL.

I caught two smaller (after seeing that big grouper I will always think of most Grouper as “smaller”) Grouper in the 20 pound class. Here’s me with one of them.

We did catch a red snapper Tuesday. Here’s Terry with that little guy.

Terry also boated two nice Amberjack. They weighed in at 41 and 43 pounds. I should have taken pictures of those Amberjack, (a.k.a. AJs, Reef Donkey) They are hard fighting fish. You can eat them, but they don’t taste as good as our Snapper and Grouper, so we typically release them.

Don and Terry also added another tasty species of fish to our catch Tuesday. They added 3 or 4 Cobia to the fish cooler. Cobia are plentiful off our coast in the Spring of the year. This year is unusual for us because they have been with us all year.

I’ll be sure to get more fish pictures next time. I do have an excuse for not getting pictures. We were too busy catching fish and that’s a good thing.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

And Now For Something Completely Different

I have not Blogged in a while because I have not been fishing on my boat. My electronics were at the shop for repair, so I was out to lunch, so to speak. Don’t feel too bad for me though. I have fished a  few times on some friends’ boats and we were able to get our limit of the “extinct” (sarcasm intended) American Red Snapper. On the last trip we got our limit in 90 minutes (so much for the shortage of snapper).

Here are just a few pictures taken this month to prove my point.

Nothing like the smile on the face of a kid with his first big snapper, eh?

Here’s what is going to make this post a bit different from my previous posts. What I hope to do is get you interested in helping us fight to keep our right to fish. Yes, there are federal agencies closing fishing all around the USA. In our area of the country its the SAFMC I won’t go into great detail here because I don’t want to scare you away with the zillions of acronyms they use and the dodgy language in the law that was amended a few years back. See Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act of 2006  In a nutshell the act requires the various commissions to end “over fishing” by 2010. The Act requires the commissions to use the “Best Available Science” to determine if “over fishing” is occurring. This sounds just fine; does it not. Who can argue with using the best available science? Who would want to use the poorest available science? Well, when there is no method, no science available to count the fish the recreational fishermen catch, they just use something in the files developed to do something else and then call it “The Best Available Science”. See Best Available Data =BAD Data, What Data?

Here’s what they really do. They make a few random phone calls to land lines in coastal counties and ask “did you catch any fish?” They drop a few fish traps in random location in the ocean. One think about snapper and grouper is that they live around structure, like rocks. If you drop a fish trap in the sand off the beach you will never catch a snapper or grouper. If you did that would you conclude that there are no snapper or grouper? They do. LOL Oh and they look at a coastal state and count the number of registered boats. They they assume that those boats fish for snapper and grouper in the ocean. Imagine the 18ft pontoon boat owner 30 miles offshore! LOL So you have 902,964 boats registered in Florida. You multiply that total by some arbitrary fudge factor number reducing it to the number of fishing boats. They you multiply that number by the number of fishermen per boat (go ahead, just make that up too), I’ll use 3. So, lets see we have. 902964 x .75x 3= 2,031,669 snapper per day; really??? This is the “best science”. You see, they don’t really count recreational fish like they do commercially caught fish. They have no idea how many snapper the recreational fisher takes in a day. I’d be the first to line up requesting that they close the fishery if my experience validated the extrapolation that they come up with, but my friends and I see lots of red snapper during the time of year we should see them.

I will be asking for your help in a few weeks to put some pressure on our Senators and Congressmen. I will post and email a link to an electronic petition asking the Federal Government to fix the broken fisheries system. When you get this, please sign it, even if you don’t fish.If you are reading this Blog then you sure know someone who does fish.  Email it to your friends and ask them to help.

STUART FL SNOOKIN

“And now for something completely different”. The offshore bite has been hit or miss as it is in the summer months, but the summer brings an opportunity to catch one of my favorite inshore fish in great numbers. The snook (some say snook like book and smone say snook like nuke, take your pick). Here’s what our friends at wiki say.

The common snook (Centropomus undecimalis) is a species of marine fish in the family Centropomidae of the order Perciformes. This species is native to the coastal waters of the western Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, from southern Florida and Texas^[1] to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

One of the largest snooks, C. undecimalis grows to a maximum overall length of 140 cm (4 ft 7 in) and a maximum recorded weight of 24 kg (54 lb). Of typical centropomid form, it possesses unremarkable coloration except for a distinctive black lateral line. It may also possess bright yellow pelvic and caudal fins especially during spawn.

Occurring in shallow coastal waters (up to 20 m [66 ft] depth), estuaries, and lagoons, the fish often enters fresh water. It is carnivorous, with a diet dominated by smaller fishes, and crustaceans such as shrimps, and occasionally crabs.

Considered an excellent food fish, the common snook is fished commercially and raised in aquaculture although it is not available for sale in the US. It is also prized as a game fish, being known for their great fighting capabilities.

Three United States Navy submarines have been named for this species, USS Robalo (SS-273) and USS Snook (SS-279) in the Second World War and USS Snook (SSN-592) in the 1950s.

The common snook is also known as the sergeant fish or róbalo. It was originally assigned to the sciaenid genus Sciaena; Sciaena undecimradiatus and Centropomus undecimradiatus are obsolete synonyms for the species.

I say that the Snook is a hard hitting, drag pulling, often acrobatic fighter. Which means lots of fun on light tackle. Here’s a picture of Verniece holding the first snook of the day.

I joined Newy and his wife Vern on their inshore boat, the “little P.O.’d. We trailered the boat from Port Canaveral to Port Salerno (Near Stuart FL). It’s a two hour ride and well worth it. Newy and Vern spent the prior evening catching pinfish (Newy’s secret bait). They put these in a large portable bait tank and hooked up an oxygen tank to it to keep the pinfish alive for the next day. Our plan was to arrive at the change of the tide and anchor up near the south jetty and wait for the outgoing tide to do its magic. The snook use the rushing, debris filled outgoing river water as cover to ambush little fish being flushed out of the river. Most of the fishermen that fish snook catch a local bait fish we call white bait. I think that they are actually scaled sardine. We trucked down our own bait, the pinfish, because the snook can’t resist them. We out fished our fellow fishermen 10 to 1 using Newy’s “secret bait. I originally thought the pinfish they caught were a bit too big for the snook. I mean, some of the pinfish were big enough to fillet. A few were approaching one pound. “Too big for the snook” was soon proven wrong.

We finally had the current going fast enough, but no bites. A few of our neighboring boats pulled up anchor and left. We were getting discouraged. Maybe they were not here in big numbers yet. We usually come in August, so maybe we were too early in the year. Newy said “let’s give it ten more minutes and we will call it a day”. Well a few short minutes later, Vern’s bait gets hammered and the fight is on. Vern won this battle (see the picture above. From that point on every bait we put in the water was attacked within seconds. We had to be careful to not all be fishing at the same time since one of us had to help land and release the latest snook.

Here’s Newy with one of his nice snook.

We did not take pictures of every snook, because, as you can see, they all looked alike. They were all 37 inches in length and about 17 inches in girth. That puts them at about 13lbs. We do not keep any snook, because the season is closed until September. Even if the season were open, these puppies would be over the size limit.

I will add a picture of me and one of my snook just to remind myself of how much fun we had.

For those of you keeping score, we landed 10 snook and lost many more all in 90 minutes. We ran out of bait and a storm was on its way to meet us, so we ran back to the dock feeling very successful. We all wore a smile during the truck ride back home. Thanks Newy and Verniece for a great day of fishing!

Petersburg Alaska Fishing 6-22-09 to 6-27-09

I fished for a week in Petersburg Alaska. Petersburg is about 80 miles south of Juno in Southeast Alaska. It is the only city on Mitkof Island. The year round population is about 3000. They are all fishermen. Imagine any city of 3000 in the lower 48. Now ask yourself if any of these cities have their own airport with two flights (737s) a day. Unusual to say the least. As elsewhere in most of Southeast Alaska, the Petersburg geography can best be described as a group of islands adjacent to the mainland. The Stikine River, draining a large part of northern British Columbia, is a major geographic feature of the area as well as a tremendous draw for salmon. Most of the waterways in the area are protected from the open Pacific. The substantial annual precipitation gives rise to many rivers and small lakes.

We planned the trip last year, after seeing Petersburg while cruising Alaska with Jane on Cruise West. While there, I had the opportunity to speak to some of the locals about the fishing available in the area. That, combined with surfing the net for fishing reports gave me the background I needed to choose my charter, Captain Peter Troy of Petersburg Fishing Adventures. Joining me were two of my fishing club members and officers, Walt Eismann and Terry Winn. My long time buddy and fishing partner from Chicago, Brian Cieply, made it a foursome. Brian became known as Norm because of his wardrobe. You see, he always wore a new Chicago Bears sweatshirt daily. Remember “Da Bears” from SNL? Enough said! Here’s a picture of our crew.

Captain Pete’s boat, the “Fast Cat” is a 30ft catamaran with a 12 foot beam. Plenty of room for us “full figured guys” to fish. Here a picture of our wonderful host, Captain Peter Troy. Notice that the cabin is enclosed. We ran 30 or so miles to reach the fishing grounds and the weather was, well, the weather was wet and cold. It was great to be able to run in comfort while most of the self guided fishermen were in open 18ft aluminum boats. Did I say it was wet and cold?

The first day we headed off the do some shoreline stream fishing. Many of the rivers in “urban” Alaska have Salmon, but most of the fishing is “combat fishing” that’s where you stand shoulder to shoulder with a few hundred of your fishing brethren to compete for the passing fish. Petersburg’s Blind Slough is. shall we say, not crowded. Here’s a picture of Pete standing with the fishes.

Here’s a look at the surrounding area.

The King Salmon run was on and the fish were chewing. We caught lots of Kings. We released the brown colored Kings so they can get up to the hatchery. We did keep many of the bright colored (silver) Kings for the freezer. The kings that just arrived from the salt water are silver in color. Their meat is very high quality because their body has not begun to change. Once they enter fresh water they change and stop eating. They literally absorb their own body, concentrating their energies on that important task of making more salmon.

Our second day was a Halibut fishing day. The Halibut is an interesting and delicious fish. Google it to learn about the changes they go through. It was a cold and wet day, but the fish cooperated enough for us to bring home our limit. We did catch many more, but the limit is one per person. Here’s a picture of three of the four. The fourth was already on it’s way to the table for our dinner that night.

Day three presented a unique opportunity (at least for me). Before trolling in open water for Salmon, we got to pull a few shrimp pots to gather the Alaskan Spot Shrimp. We filled a 5 gallon bucket with these beauties.

When we opened one trap, we discovered a hitchhiker eating “our shrimp”. The nerve!

We did some Salmon trolling and got our limit of four. Here’s a picture of me with “The Big One”

Our fourth day brought a successful day of Halibut fishing. Capt. Pete said that the weather forecast was for bad weather. Yes, it could be worse that cold and wet. We told him we really really wanted to go for Halibut and we would not complain if the weather was bad and the fish were un-cooperative. We got lucky with the weather. The NOAA forecast was dead wrong (as usual). We were happy to see flat seas and calm wind. So were the whales and seals that joined us.

Here’s Terry with the big Halibut of the day. This one tipped the scales at 82 lbs. YUM

The weather on the last day (have I mentioned cold and wet?) forced us back to the Blind Slough for more shoreline fishing for Salmon. We did not keep as many as we did on the first day, but we had enough action to keep us “in the game”. Here’s Brian pretending that he caught all the Salmon. LOL

We had a great time with great friends and an awesome Captain and host. Pete is a fantastic cook and Captain. We put on a few more pounds on this trip. See below. We do look “fat and happy”.

View Full Album

Fishing On Newy’s Boat 5-13-09, Port Canaveral FL

I had the pleasure of fishing with my friends Dave and Newy (Don) on Don’s 24ft Wellcraft, the “Angler Management”. We got a late start because we had to stop for fuel on the way, but that delay allowed us to meet up with some willing bait. Another friend of ours, Paul, had left earlier that us and radioed that he was having a hard time finding bait. We had to search a bit, but we did find some bait to catch with our Sabiki rigs. Apparently, the sardines, hard tails, and pin fish slept in late that morning.

After loading our live well with bait we ran to the 27 fathom line. That’s a ledge created by earth movement that runs parallel to the coast line . It is in water 160-180 ft deep. A fathom, by the way is 6ft. This ledge should be in 162ft of water if it were true to it’s name. The ledge meanders east and west as it makes it way north. It would look like a snake seen from above. This area is home to Red Snapper and various kinds of Grouper. Just the kind of fish you want to invite home to dinner.

Our first couple of stops on the ledge were not productive. As we approached lunch time, we began to have some action. I started to catch Red Snapper. Unfortunately, these snapper were shorter than the minimum size (20 inches), so we released them after asking them to invite their big brothers and sisters to “hook up” with us.

Finally, Newy got a good bite. He struggled with a good fighter for a few minutes. We were hoping that he had a big Red Snapper, but we suspected that his catch would be an Amberjack, judging by the kind of fight the fish was making. We guessed right. Newy had a nice 28lb Amberjack. We normally don’t keep these fish to eat, because they taste “fishier” than our preferred Snapper and Grouper. Dave decided to keep this one to take home to smoke. Smoked Amberjack makes very good fish dip, or so they say.

Here’s Dave with Newy’s Amberjack.

The Snapper actually began to cooperate after lunch, our lunch that is. Dave makes a great hoagie sandwich. I’ve been putting on weight since I started fishing with Dave. Anyway, as I said, the Snapper stated biting. I landed three keeper Red Snapper with Dave getting one keeper. We got these along with many other Amberjack and Lesser Amberjacks. These are two different kinds of fish in the Jack family. Like all Jacks they are great fighters. The Lesser Amberjack has a proportionately larger eye and deeper body than greater amberjack. It’s also smaller than the Greater Amberjack; hence the name.

Here’s Dave holding a couple of Red Snapper

We were too busy fishing to take pictures while we were offshore. Dave volunteered to be our topless model when we got back to the dock. I think he tells his friends that he caught all the fish we see him holding, so don’t tell his friends about my theory.

We had a fun action filled day aboard Newy’s boat. Thanks for the ride Don and thanks for lunch for the Dave. Most of all thanks for the giggles and grins. Never a dull moment for sure!

A Fun, But Not Fulfilling Day 3-6-09

Friday I had the pleasure of taking my Brother-In-Law, Claude, fishing out of Ponce Inlet, FL. Notice, I did not say “catching”, but more to follow. Claude and Family were visiting because their son, David was celebrating his 30th birthday. Dave lives in nearby Rockledge and his family from Richmond VA flew in to surprise him. Happy BD Dave!
The first order of business is to catch some live bait. Here are pictures of the boys hard at work. We were able to fill the live well in short order with pinfish, tinker mackerel, sardines and assorted others, including a few blue fish. I should have known that this was a sign the fishing for “real” fish was going to be a challenge. It seems that when bait is easy to come by, catching snapper and grouper is tough.






While we did not manage to catch our sought after species, we did catch a cobia to bring home for dinner. They are a pretty good fighter when caught on the bottom. Claude got to experience fighting a fish that want to pull him overboard. Here’s Claude with the Cobia.



We had a fun day even though the target fish were not cooperating. Claude got to bottom fish in the ocean for the first time. My buddy Don (NEWY) Newhauser was a pleasure to fish with as always. Thanks guys!

The seas were kind and some friends were willing to brave the morning chill this Saturday. It was 37 degrees as were loaded the boat this morning.



We made our 14 mile run to my now favorite bait spot and used our sabiki rigs for fish for bait. A sabiki rig is a multi-hook leader with tiny hooks for catching small bait. The baits we catch are about the size of bream. You know, the size of the blue gill and sunfish kids catch on the pond. Here's a picture



We filled the live well with some excellent "snapper candy". They really like the blue runners. Here's one below.



The snapper and grouper also like to eat pinfish. BTW the spines on the dorsal fin of these little fish are like pins. Don't ask me how I know. Here's one.



We ran another 8 miles to a broken ledge in 90 foot of water and began to fish for "real" fish. One of my buddies was already on the ledge and he was catching one fish after the other. Here is a picture of Terry on his boat the "T'sMe". I took this picture when we got back to the inlet at the end of the day. It was too bumpy out there to get a good picture while we fished.



We fished the area all day and we caught lots of fish. We were fortunate enough to get 9 keeper size red snapper and one Scamp. A scamp is a member of the grouper family. It is by far the best tasting grouper you can catch. Here's a picture of some of the crew holding up some of the fish. That brown fish that Dave has in his hand is one of the scamps.




Thanks to Don and Verniece as well as Dave and Cathy for sharing a great day offshore. I can't end the post without a picture of Dave clowning around. We asked Dave to get in the fish box with the fish for a picture, but his wife, Cathy and common sense prevailed.

The "grumpy old men crew", me, Newy, Jack Reidel, and Dave (POPZ101)were on the water at first light. I have not seen seas this nice in years. We could run any speed we wished. My boat handled the 1ft swells easily

The bait spot produced. We got lots of pins and beeliners and a few sardines and thread fins. Terry called me Sunday evening with his report and said make sure you get some deens. He was right. The snapper would only eat the deens and threadfins. The bait spot also produced a surprise for Jack. He hooked a cobia that desided to make a meal out of one of his baits. Good thing the had the larger sabiki rigs. That heavier line allowed him to tire the cobia out and we got him in the box.

We worked the 90ft ledge all morning since I knew the deeper stuff was not working. Newy jigged up another cobia and we got 4 keeper snaps, as well as a big trigger fish and a mango.

The bite was hot from 9am till 12:30pm. Not much was happening in the afternoon. The water was fairly dirty on the ledge, but the fish could find live baits. We did move shallower on the way on, but we got nothing for the box; just shorts. Oh and the current was under a 1/2 knot, all day.

We had a great day on calm seas with a few fish for dinner. Or crew was excellent and Dave's gourmet sandwiches were awesome. Thanks guys!