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.