By: Capt. Joel Brandenburg
If I had to pick one species of fish to target for the rest of my life, I’d have to pick snapper. The reason I’d choose snapper is because: They bite and fight hard. They are plentiful. There’re many varieties. The season is all year long. You can keep a reasonable limit. They are the very best table fare. You can use a variety of baits. With so many different species, I’m going to focus on my three most favorite species; Mangrove Snapper – We like to target mangrove snapper in real shallow water back in the East Bahia Honda flats. The EBH flats are difficult to navigate because you have to know your tides to get in and out. With snapper in particular, the old saying down in the Keys is “he who has the most chum wins.” We like to Power Pole down in various grass flats and hang a chum ring bag over the transom with a block or two of Green Tournament chum. We use a #5 Penn rod n reel combo with 15lb test mono line and a 1.0 J hook or large hook depending on the current.
We use fresh ballyhoo that we either catch in our Barracuda cast net or buy from a bait shop. Each ballyhoo makes 4 or 5 chunks depending on the size of the ballyhoo. Each chunk should be a little bigger than your thumb. Hook the bait into the skin through the meat and back out of the skin. Make the furthest cast you can make in or around your chum line. You’ll feel peck, peck, peck and wait for the boom. Set your hook on the boom not the pecks. The reason you want your ballyhoo chunks to be bigger than your thumb is because smaller snapper will show up to your bait first and they will try to get that chunk in their mouth, but they can’t so while all the little snapper are attacking the chunk the dominant snapper moves in and says “move aside, I’ll take this” and just sucks it in. This way if you use shrimp, pilchards, squid etc. you end up catching a bunch of small mangrove snapper and not many big ones.
Yellowtail Snapper: We like to target yellowtail on the patch reef off Marathon in about 85ft of water. Days when the wind and current are going the same way are the best. The worst are when the wind and current are going the opposite way because that means your chum line will be going up your anchor line and yellowtail can be very spooky. So spooky that we like to let our chum flow for 15 minutes before we ever put a line in the water which can drive anxiously clients nuts. We like to eventually flat line (open bail line feeding out freely in the current) so your hooked bait (shrimp, slice of ballyhoo or small pilchards) flows at the same rate and speed as your chum pieces. Then introduce another line or three once we feel the bite is on and the yellowtail are fully committed on our chum line. We use large hooks and mono line that is best suited for the current and water clarity on that particular day. Bait should sink slow and mono should be as thin as you can stand. Mono leader should be 10lb to 20lb depending on water clarity as snapper size. Let your bait flow a football field before you check it.
Mutton Snapper: When you see a button it’s a mutton, with the exception of a lane snapper. Both mutton and lane have a distinct black spot near the tail. Mother Nature gave these snappers this black button as a defense mechanism. If sharks or barracudas for example want to eat a mutton they will instinctively aim for its head and because it has that black button which resembles it, they’ll mistakenly target the mutton’s tail rather than its head and the snapper can escape it’s predator. We like to target muttons in as shallow as 15ft to as deep as 250ft of water. The target depth varies with seasons, water temperature and water clarity. Mutton’s like to feed on white sand bottoms. We like to use the smallest egg sinker that will hold the bottom depending on current velocity. We like to use a 10ft to 70ft 20lb to 30lb mono leader with a 2.0 to 5.0 “J” hook and bait of choice is live pinfish or ballyhoo.
— To fish with Captain Joel Brandenburg of Ana banana Fishing Co.,
call or text him at 305.395.4212 or 813.267.4401 or visit www.marathonfloridakeysfishingcharters.com or stop by at
11699 Overseas Hwy, Marathon, FL