Most species need to be 54" long to keep them. We haven't caught a keeper yet at a time of year they were legal to keep. We lost a few big ones with their tail slap slicing through the braid, so we went to 8 ft steel leaders which is hurting our casting distance from the beach.
Our sharking is more of a sideline hobby. We're more serious about bull reds, but we start messing with the sharks once we have a limit of bulls in the box. We still have a lot to learn about the bigger ones (legal keepers), but the small ones are not to hard to catch.
Cut mullet is fine for bait. We tend to catch about twice as many sharks in the GI area compared with the beaches and jetties in Cameron.
No one in our crew wants to kayak out the baits which is the most common way to put baits in the deeper water for the bigger sharks. We've messed around with a pneumatic bait launcher (like a potato cannon), but you need to freeze all your bait bullets (including mullet, hook, sinker, and leader) in advance and there is a lot of equipment to haul to the beach. Holly and GI don't allow driving on the beach, so it's a bit of a haul for the equipment, and you're either carrying the cannon back and forth to the vehicle and pump for filling or carrying a battery out to the beach to power the compressor.
I like the idea of using a drone to fly baits out and drop them, but other members of the crew don't think it will be viable in the long term. There have been reports of crashes on windy days, and that gets expensive quick at $800-$1200 per drone loss.
A couple members of the crew are liking the idea of wading and planning to buy chest waders to go out further more comfortably in the colder months. The idea is to walk out 150-200 ft, cast as far as possible from there and then walk back to the beach and put the rod in a pvc holder until the shark bites.
After evaluating our recent trip to GI, the general consensus is to fish Cameron next time because of fewer sharks and more reliable success with lots of bull reds.
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