Florida offshore bottom fishing

[Chrisper4694]

Was down in florida the other week fishing before the huricane with my buddy Morris Campbell did one day saltwater and two days fresh (the fw pics of peacocks, mayans and knife fish i posted on the fw section of the forum).

The plan was to hunt down a bunch of inshore species but the water was absolutely terrible...fortunately the weather was perfect for an offshore center console ride! We fished the gulf out of boca grande and had to drive about 20 miles offshore to find clear water, which isn't normal.

We ended up finding some schools of mahi and we got them feeding voraciously to the point that you didn't even need a lure, just a bare hook and they would attack it! Unfortunately the bigger ones never showed up so after a bit of fun we moved on.

We saw a sailfish and some yellow fin tuna but even with our fresh caught blue runners, sardines, and minnows we couldn't get them to bite so we moved on to hit some bottom spots. We settled into some spots and hammered multiple species of snapper including vermillion and lane and grouper, including some nice 10-12lbs red grouper and some smaller strawberries.

We had a few probably GIANT golliath grouper grab our big red snappers and pin us to the bottom (we were using fairly light gear and didn't have a chance of moving them ever). So we put some 2-3lbs snappers on a heavy duty set up and let it down but those damn things wouldn't touch it haha...they only wanted the 10-12lbs reds on the light gear!

All in all it was great fishing, but i'll have to go back for those damn goliaths and all the inshore species haha. plenty of delicious fish vacuum sealed and frozen that took t he plane ride back to NJ with me. and the gulf ocean was ridiculously calm it was crazy smooth...i've been on lake hopatcong in my tin can in rougher water!

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