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!