Ron's Saltwater Fishing Blog

Sebastian Inlet is located about half way down Florida's East Coast. On September 1, every year when snook season opens, it becomes a gathering place for snook fishermen. On an outgoing tide, the boats stack up in teh inlet at night, each one taking a shot at a huge linesider.

The air was crisp as we walked down the beach, crisp enough to more than hint at the coming of fall weather. Oh for some good fall weather to turn on the fish on the North Carolina shore! Read more...

Fall means a change of weather with cooling temperatures, and cooling water temperatures mean fish. While lots of anglers opt for football, the savvy Gulf of Mexico anglers are sharpening their hooks and getting ready to jerk some grouper off the bottom.

Snook season in Florida opened today. It reminds me of a time I used to walk the canal banks fishing for them. Every afternoon after school, I would head for Snapper Creek with my spinning outfit and a few white bucktail jigs. I was fishing for snook, and there were plenty of them there to be caught... Read more...

This is not an endorsement and I do not want to get political, but the apparent Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin's husband is a commercial fisherman. I wonder what her being elected would bring to his job and commercial fishing interests. I've seen pictures of her on his boat helping him net salmon. This could prove to be an interesting twist as the campaign moves on.

The American Sportfishing Association just announced that in an August 25 Executive Memo to the Secretary’s of Defense, Interior and Commerce and the Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), President Bush directed them to study potential marine protected areas in the central Pacific Ocean. The American Sportfishing Association (ASA) supports the President for his direction to the agencies and CEQ to sustain access to recreational fishing as part of their study.

“We are very pleased that after much discussion, the President included sustained access for recreational fishing in the central Pacific region as an integral part of a conservation management plan,” said ASA President and CEO Mike Nussman. “We are even more pleased that the President chose not to include two areas of great concern for the sportfishing community, the Gulf of Mexico’s Islands in the Stream and marine areas of the southeast United States.”

As outlined in the memo, the central Pacific region includes coral reefs, pinnacles, sea mounts, islands and the surrounding waters of Johnston Atoll, Howland, Baker and Jarvis Islands, Kingman Reef, Palmyra Atoll, Wake Island and Rose Atoll. These are all high-value fish habitat areas.

Nussman further said, “It is our view that the Gulf of Mexico and marine waters off the southeast United States coast are adequately managed by the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic Fishery Management Councils. Any need for marine protected areas should be addressed through the councils’ public and science-driven process.”

We were bottom fishing some twenty miles offshore over an artificial reef, using small live fish for bait. One of our favorite live bottom baits is a small vermillion snapper - a beeliner. Grouper and red snapper love these fish, and I have used them for years - that is up until now... Read more...

Similar to hunting for game, fishing for tripletail in the late summer is a matter of getting to where they live. If you can get to the places they frequent, you are likely to find one or more, and late summer is the time for some big ones...

We were fishing Blue Bank in Florida Bay, about fifteen miles south of Flamingo. Trout were working the bank, and we were catching them on live shrimp under a popping cork on an outgoing tide. There were two other boats on the bank with us, one from Islamorada and one more that followed us down from Flamingo. Did we need to run that far?

Back in the '50s and '60s as I grew up and learned to fish from my father, I learned to like certain fish and to dislike others. Not that they had done anything in particular to cause me to like or dislike them, but more because my Dad, who in my mind knew more about fish and fishing than any soul on earth, liked or disliked them... Read more...