Bottom fish move to the closer reefs in the fall as the water cools. They tend to stay there until the water really chills down, at which point they move well offshore. Our fear was that the recent string of cold weather days had cooled the water too much.
Our fears were realized when we located the first wreck, an old tug boat about seven miles off the beach in sixty feet of water. Actually, we had a hard time finding the tug; the GPS numbers we had were not indicative of any bottom structure at all.
We moved from there to several other areas of culverts, old cars, dumpsters, and ledges. In each case, not only were several boats already all over the structures, but no one was catching any fish. We all appeared to be after the same fish, grouper and snapper.
The week before, Tom, my son, had caught fish on dead finger mullet, opting for them over the much more expensive cigar minnows. So we did the same thing, bypassing the usual bait of choice offshore. We did manage to catch a few cigar minnows on a Sabiki rig, and they were used in short order, but not to a snapper or grouper.
It was about now that Tom began tying a new leader. This time he put on a fish finder rig with two hooks and a pyramid sinker on the bottom. He moved to smaller hooks and pulled out the one package of squid we decided to take. Bang! He doubled up on two small vermillion snapper - we call them Beeliners. I continued to use the larger baits in a variety of ways, loosing all of them to smaller bait stealing fish. It was obvious that we were going to go bust on the larger fish. The Beeliners were there and cooperative, so we decided to simply catch what was biting.
I changed rigs too, and we proceeded to catch about fifty Beeliners. Only twelve of them met the legal limit, but we had a lot of fun catching them. The action got so fast, that a number of other boats in the area spotted our rods and made their way to us. When they saw the Beeliners, they slowed down, disappointed that we were not catching "real" fish. Tom caught three to my one, and he did that for one reason. He had been told by one of the local experts to try a bottom fishing trick.
He took two small chartreuse swim tail grubs, actually the kind I used crappie fishing in freshwater. Placing one on each hook of his double hook rig, he then put the normal small piece of squid on the hook. I guess the color and flash worked, because he wore me out after that.
So I finish this piece with a tip for you. Next time you are bottom fishing, whether from a pier, a boat, or the shore, try dressing up you hook with a little color. The little grubs stay on remarkably well, and they obviously work!
