Capt. Bart Marx
December in SWFL of 2020, can you believe it? January 2021 is just around the corner! This month we celebrate Christmas and usually spend time with family. The fishing can be lots of fun this month, keeping an eye on the cold fronts and picking a safe time to get offshore. We can run into the gulf and follow the stone crab trap buoys and target tripletales. They get just under the buoys and look like a garbage bag stuck on the rope. If you see one as you run by, go and make a U-turn, come back to the buoy and have a rod ready. A medium 15-20 lb. setup with just a hook for a live or artificial shrimp. Ease up to the buoy so you can identify the fish and make a cast past it, then reel the bait just up to the fish and let it start sinking. Let it fall till it is out of site or the fish has attacked it, then reel. Back away from the buoy, so you do not get tangled with it. They put up a great fight for a small fish and they are good table fare too.
Out in the gulf on your hard bottom ledges, from 45’- 60’, using shrimp or small crabs/crustaceans you can target hogfish. They like things that are crunchy. Sometimes you have to spend some extra time and patience to get these guys to bite; they are not real aggressive, kind of laid back. When you get one on they fight by going in circles and are very stubborn when they get close to the boat. Fresh they are some of the best eats out there and lots of people don’t know you can catch these on a hook and line. I have caught plenty off the coast of SWFL with a hook and shrimp! They are very good eating.
Another hard fighting good eating fish is sheepshead. They will be staging on structure near the coast, like small little ledges and rock piles. As the water cools they come out into the gulf to spawn and they like shrimp too. They have a small mouth with roes of flat crushers that can be hard to hook. I use a 1/0 inline VMC circle hook and a small shrimp or a piece of shrimp. I use a knocker rig, a chicken rig, or a fish finder rig; these all work well. And this is the time of year that I like to troll for gag grouper. I use the big lipped lures that are designed to reach 30 plus feet of depth. Troll them around some of the ledges that you normally would bottom fish for gags and they sometimes will come 15’ or even 20’ off the bottom to attack those baits!