Grouper Season is finally here!

by Raymond Munoz, Capt. Jax

May rst is the opening day of grouper season. A day that anglers have been waiting for, for 5 months. Normally the wind would be blowing 30 mph but this year we caught a break on our opening trip. We started the day super early looking for bait. In fact we spent about 2 hours catching horse pilchards. en we spent another hour catching fresh ballyhoo. We caught 160 pieces.

At 10 am we set up on our rst spot, some hard bottom in two hundred feet of water. We like to sh these big grouper with 30 to 50 size conventional reels lled to the top with 60 lb. braid. e rig is a 16/24 oz bank sinker, depending on the current and dept. We use 30-40 of 80 lb. mono leader tipped with the last 6-8 with 80 lb. uorocarbon. e hook is a 7/0 or 8/0 circle hook. We drop this straight down and leave it on the bottom. We sh with two set-ups at one time. en we’ll put back a couple live pilchards on at line spinners.

My friends and I have been doing this trip for 20 years now and this particular day was an alltime weird bite. Every time we put a ballyhoo down, we would get hit right away but it would be an instant cut o . is happened to us about 30 times before we got the rst real sh to the surface. It was worth the trouble; the rst sh was a monster red grouper. Behind it we saw a big shark following it but didn’t attack. We thought we had just gotten lucky. e second real bite was a big mutton. Another shark followed the sh all the way to the boat but didn’t take the sh either. is happened with all the sh we caught.

Behind the at line we saw a n out of the water, chasing something behind the boat. A few seconds later, boom! e big live pilchard got slammed. It was a small shark. At this moment we gured out that the sharks didn’t want big sh, they wanted ballyhoo and pilchards, which was a great thing! We had a great day overall, catching two black n tuna, 34 lbs., and 28 lbs. We caught several big muttons up to 16 lbs. and the red grouper was 14 lbs. e winner for the day was a monster black grouper, weighing 38 lbs.

If anyone would like to experience this type of shing contact my good friend Captain Mike Millz at M and M charters (786) 525-9269.

786.300.5362