It’s time to break out some tricks to put the odds in your favor for putting some grouper in your fish box. Let’s start with a chum bomb. Cut up some bait fish, put them in a paper bag with some rocks and drop it down on a rod. Wait about four minutes and yank up hard. The bag will rip releasing the bait on the bottom.
Stop by a feed store and buy a large horse syringe. Load it up with menhaden oil and inject a butterflied bait or a plugged bait. When the bait hits the bottom the oil will attract grouper.
The 80 to 100 foot reefs are holding loads of grouper this month. Live baits work well too. Drop a sabiki rig down on some of our artificial reefs for cigar minnows, sardines, and pin fish. When you drop one of these baits down, hang on! The grouper will work you. Start off with about 10-feet of 80-pound test leader and if you start losing fish, step it up to 130-pound test. We like a 7.0 circle hook with just enough weight to hold bottom.
As always, send out live baits on the surface while at anchor for cobia, kingfish and dolphin.
The big mangrove snappers are chewing. Chum them up in the water column and catch them on spinning tackle.