Outdoors | Night fishing in Gulf of Mexico pays off big for anglers
Around the early March full moon offshore fishing reports were a notch above terrible. Many anglers went out and experienced bites that were non-existent and left them with mostly empty fish boxes.
Their problem? It seems most fished during the day while fish were feeding at night and gorging themselves.
“I had never fished in the Gulf of Mexico at night before,” said Travis Redder. “Now I’m wondering why I ever fish during the day and can’t wait to get back out at night.”
Redder joined a crew of six anglers who went fishing a few days after the full moon. They left from Palmetto around 1 p.m. and headed offshore aboard a 30 foot Scarab. Their original plan was to fish shallow for hogfish then head off for tuna around 45-miles around sunset. But that plan changed when the daytime fishing was slow and weather was sporty.
“We started in 40 feet and got some sheepshead, small grunts and grouper. There were no hogfish and we spent quite a bit of time trying to catch one. Once we started to run deeper we decided it was too choppy and probably not worth it, so went to a reef in 95 feet of water,” Redder recalled.
“We caught a bunch of amberjack, a big shark, some tomtates and a few yellowtail snapper. When the sun went down we moved to a ledge in 90-feet and there was a solid show of fish 10-15 feet off the bottom.”
They started dropping lines around 8 p.m. For the next three hours Redder said he experienced peak fishing as every angler around the boat began to catch one fish after another.
“It was like once we got the first few they just went off after that. Everyone was bringing up snapper. I looked up at Geoff Groves and his son and there were just fish laying everywhere, mostly big mangrove snapper. We were throwing back anything under 15- inches.”
Using light spinning tackle with a 20 pound leader and a light jighead tripped with shrimp, each angler caught mangrove snapper after mangrove snapper with a few red snapper, lane snapper and vermillion snapper mixed in. The key was getting eaten on the drop as the jighead slowly went through the water column.
“I just started fishing jigheads a few years ago and catch a lot more snapper now,” Redder said. “We were done fishing by 11:00 PM. It was so good that night we stopped catching them because we knew we were close to our limit. To be sure we didn’t go over we left them biting since both coolers were full!”
At the dock they unloaded the coolers. A total of 52 mangrove snapper, two yellowtails and a mix of lanes scattered across the dock. The biggest mangrove snapper went nearly 23-inches, with many others bigger than 20-inches. Each angler took their portion to fillet the next day.
“It was crazy, unbelievable. I love mangrove fishing but now i’ve been spoiled with that night.”