Lots of hogfish being caught lately near shore from around 30-70ft of water the hogfish bite seems to really be taking off finally. They love the live shrimp but fiddler crabs or rock shrimp work for them too. Around 20-30lb floro and 3-4ot hooks are best. A very natural presentation helps with minimal weight on your line. You can use one of three methods for them to be very successful. My favorite, but often the most difficult is the light knocker rig with 1oz of lead or less. Also, a nekid ball jig works well in the 3/4oz, 1oz or 2oz sizes. Finally, the most common method a lot of people use is the jig head method so just a bare jig head with the live shrimp or fiddle crab on the hook for bait. Just keep in mind, hogfish are often the last fish to bite so you have to fish through all the other more aggressive grey snapper (white grunts), seabass, juvenile grouper, vermililion, lanes, and mangrove snapper. Then finally some porgies will start biting and shortly after the first hogfish will come up. Once you get the first one you should get a few more every 5-10 minutes and then after you stop catching em with more than 15-20 minutes since your last hogfish its time to pull up anchor and move onto the next spot. The smaller ledges and rock piles seem to hold the most cooperative hogfish, while the larger ledges and spots often have more fish species and numbers eating your baits before the hogfish can. Plus, those larger areas typically have more fishing pressure from other anglers making it tough to get quality hogfish off those areas.
The mackerel are super thick near shore right now as well. We are seeing them from the beaches out to around fifteen miles from shore. They love eating the trolling spoons 12-18ft behind number one or number two planners or the smaller plugs like the rapala xrap 20’s or trolling feathers. You can also catch plenty of them near shore by getting up on a near shore wreck, reef or rock pile that’s holding bait and chum them over to your boat floating out live green backs using the methods of live bait we talked about in the inshore section.
Kingfish are finally showing up more and more and were catching them trolling the rapala xrap magnum 30’s or 40’s or the bigger trolling skirts. You can sometimes catch them trolling the spoons behind planners but often they like the big plugs or skirts more. We often catch them flat line fishing while bottom fishing near shore as well. Flat line fishing while drifting is easy as you can use a dead threadfin or sardine on a stinger rig with 30-40lb wire. When anchor fishing, if the current isn’t strong you may need to add a ballon around 4-10ft above your stinger rig to keep that threadfin, sardine or live blue runner up on the top of the water column dancing in the waves while you are bottom fishing. Often this will produce some kingfish action to compliment your bottom fishing fun!
On the bottom around 70-100 foot of water is where we have been finding lane snapper, vermillion snapper, mangrove snapper, some red grouper and a few gag grouper. The gags are starting to move into the near shore waters eating pigfish, pinfish, squirrel fish or dead threadfins. If you are lucky to sabiki up some live sardines they are killer near shore grouper candy too. Red grouper like live pinfish, pig fish, squirrel fish or baby octopus or squid wing strips cut to mimic octopus tentacles. For both of these grouper species around 60lb test and a 6-7ot circle hook is the best near shore grouper tackle selection. For the snapper species, I like using around 30-40lb fluorocarbon leaders with 4ot hooks and a cut threadfin plug on a double snell rig. However, live shrimp on a knocker rig or jig head or nekidball jig will work well with lighter tackle spinning rod set ups and it makes near shore snapper fishing a ton of fun.
