I had a discounted fixed price trip just for snappers. My plan was to go to the west. It is an easy 15 mile run to the many rigs available. With the winds blowing out of the west for 3 days that idea was shot full of holes. Besides the entire area was full of heavy thunderstorms. The gulf was a mess and many charters canceled. I was forced to run south and to the east. I had a 22 mile run down the river before hitting the gulf. When I hit the gulf the seas were just bearable and as I turned to the north east behind the cover of land the seas got better. At our first rig the mangrove did just as they are supposed to.
I had high hopes but after 5 fish they shut off. I ran to a nearby rig and found nothing at all. While giving it a try my deckhand drops down a curly tail jig for a cobia. He hooks up and we now have a scamp grouper in the box but nothing else. A storm is closing in so I move on. We dodged the storms and bounced around picking up one or two at each stop. My XM weather system is showing the rig I am on soon to be very wet. There is one good sized rig in state waters that should just be out of the line of this storm so we head for it. We will still have to put up with the winds from it but just enough out of the way to be comfortable. As I pull up so is another charter captain. We pick a corners on the rig and settle in. We get a mangrove and he gets a shark. We already had our share of them so he could have all of them. We get a red snapper he gets a cobia. We get a redfish he gets a cobia. This went on for almost 45 minutes with a mangrove, a shark, and a lot of redfish. We only have 1 red snapper but it is a start.
We were so close that he had some bait I had run out of so I tossed him a hook with the spinning rod and he attached the bait I needed. After trying different depths I dial in on the red snapper. The boat next to me is getting a lot of sharks but in between he is putting some cobia in the boat also. We lost one cobia and he landed 6 of them. Once dialed in it was game on for the red snapper. Here is a triple.
If you look at the first picture and this picture you can see the volatile weather around us. We had a good looking box and a limit of red snapper in no time. The other boat not happy watching us bail 9 - 15 pound red snapper. I look at my XM weather and see I can not go in Baptiste Collette The lightning and heavy rain is not moving out of the area at all. They have been pounded most of the day. North east pass is clear but the river is still a mess. I start heading in at a slow pace just to let the rain move out.
Just before I left I told my buddy the depth to fish. He was 15 short of his boats limit at that time. It did not take him long after that to make his fish box red. The trip in was slow with me going 12-15 mph just to keep out of the slop. We got so close to the storm the temp dropped about 15 deg. or so. We got back to Venice Marina at 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon and no boats were at the fuel dock or at the fish cleaning station. Did not have to wait to hang fish and had both cleaning tables to ourselves.
No buddy believed we never got wet. I told them we were Sooooo close we could just about reach out and touch the rain. We made a day of it and kept safe and dry. With 12 mangroves, 12 red snapper 9-15 pounds, 1 scamp grouper, and 1 redfish we had a good fish cleaning party. We got several bull reds but this was the only one small enough to be good for the table. The red snapper are so big the redfish looks like a 22 incher. It is not that small.
Life is Good!
Fishing is not a matter of life or death. It's more important than that.
CAPT HOOP -- OUR FREEDOM
07-22-2013, 11:00 PM
Targeting Snapper
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