After recent cold fronts, shallow waters of Gulf of Mexico are teeming with life
After this season’s first series of strong cold fronts, cooling water temperatures have started put fish on the move. The biggest change has been noticed in nearshore Gulf waters where both pelagic and bottom fish have been caught over the past week.
With a decent forecast, I joined Jay Travis and Gil McSwain to see what was biting on Friday. It looked like the wind would slowly calm throughout the day, so our plan was to target a little bit of everything and be ready for not only what may be shallow but deeper if the weather allowed.
We prepared with varieties of dead bait and I picked up 12 dozen shrimp. After a couple stops for live bait, we had a livewell full of threadfin, pilchards and pinfish to go with the shrimp. Travis pointed his 32-foot Contender 7 miles west to try for hogfish and gag grouper first.
McSwain had never caught a hogfish on hook and line. I gave him the run down of the technique. He was rigged up with a Hogball XL. I said to use half shrimp, get it all the way to the bottom, and the hogfish will find it. If it’s off the bottom they don’t want it. Any sign of a bite, start reeling and the circle hook should do the rest.
Within minutes he had hooked up and it showed the beautiful red color coming up from 40 feet below. Travis grabbed the net and swung in McSwain’s first hogfish.
“That was awesome,” McSwain said. “All those years I never really thought you could catch them on hook and line.”
On the next bait I also landed a hogfish. Mine was a smaller female, right at 14 inches, that we released. With hogfish the sexes of each are different in look, so anglers can release the females to grow and reproduce. Perhaps it was good karma as the next bait produced a larger male hogfish for me.
Travis said that gag grouper also love to live on the ledge we were fishing. I dropped a pinfish down on a larger rod and was rewarded with a legal-sized gag that we added to the box. A few more hogfish and we decided to head deeper to see if anything was home.
For the next two hours the lid on the fishbox remained shut. It might have been more about timing than the locations we were fishing as we dealt with dozens of small amberjack on spots that typically hold snapper and grouper.
A final destination was selected that was about 20 miles offshore, a large ledge that we hoped we could put to use our remaining live bait and dead bait for chum. Once anchored we began to chum threadfin and I readied a 1/8-ounce jighead while Travis worked a 3/8-ounce. Almost immediately we both hooked into mangrove snapper on the drop.
The bite was every bait for the next 90 minutes. Every time a jig would reach about 60 or 70 feet, a mangrove snapper would come off the bottom to hit it on the drop. It didn’t matter if it was a shrimp, shiner or pinfish. All seemed to work.
In the middle of the snapper frenzy our freelined pinfish was eaten. McSwain grabbed the rod and we hoped for a tuna on the other end. About 10 minutes later our hopes were confirmed, and a shallow water blackfin tuna was added to the already tasty fishbox.
We headed in shortly after to make the best use of the short daylight hours. It was very apparent that the shallow waters of the Gulf were coming to life. This time last year we were dealing with the after effects of red tide in the same shallow waters we fished Friday. Now we’re excited to get back out and do it all again.