by Capt. Bart Marx
Hello Fellow Anglers, it is December and this is the time of family and friends spending time together. Most of us have busy lives and are doing life wide open. I pray you take time with your family to go fishing and leave all the stuff behind and enjoy. The migration of the snow birds has started and the bait and mackerels, too. Between the fronts, if you get offshore to find the birds and bait, the kings are close by. They will, at times, get near the artificial reefs and this is where the baits hangout that attract the mackerels. You may troll for them or if you have the means to catch threadfins and anchor near these reefs and cast the live baits with some wire is the most fun. Yea if the kings are there, as soon as your bait hits the water it usually gets slammed. And they have a nickname of “smoker” as they will strip some line and fast too. Also, around some of the close reefs the sheepshead will be starting to migrate offshore to spawn. As the waters cool this happens, the flounder do a very similar thing migrating. This is all dependent on the cooling of the Gulf waters. Kings like between sixty-eight to seventy- six degrees water temperature. The sheepshead and flounder will be later in the month as the waters cool.
So if you are looking for grouper, the reds tend to migrate to deeper waters as it gets cooler and the gags tend to come in closer, even inshore. Also, there should be some pompano along the beaches and along the passes and on the outside bars of the harbor. Another trick is to get out on the water before most of the other boats and run the offshore stone crab trap lines in search for tripletail, make sure you have live shrimp or DOA natural clear baits. This is site fishing at its best, you see them and you drive past and return cautiously as not to spook them. This is where you use your redfish rod with a shrimp on a hook and cast to them or use the DOA. This is fun and exciting too. If you have guests coming from up north and would like to try some of the fishing activities I have the boat and all the gear plus license. Give Capt. Bart Marx a call at 941-979-6517 or e-mail me at captbart@alphaomegacharters.com And we can get you hooked up with an opportunity to make some Florida fishing memories. And it may even become an annual thing. For those that you know like to fish get them a gift certificate for a fishing charter.
