The big news nearshore this week is the plentiful mackerel and the hogfish bite getting pretty darn good. The kingfish are around but not in huge cooperative numbers at this time. I am confident the next full moon will bring us a big push of kingfish and that’s only about two weeks away! The mackerel on the other hand are super thick around the area and very willing to cooperate whether your trolling, chumming and using live bait, or casting plugs into actively feeding schools near shore. If you are cruising along and find one of those ‘showering’ bait schools in the near shore waters from the beaches out to about 12-14 miles there’s most likely hundreds of mackerel underneath causing the bait to be forced up to the surface in a tight chaotic ball. This allows you an easy target as you want to work the edges of the bait ball for nice mackerel and perhaps the occasional early season kingfish. Trolling is tons of fun with the number one or two planners and the mackerel to kingfish spoons in the 3-8 inch range, and the rapla xrap plugs work well too in the 20 and 30 sizes. However, drifting around the school and casting the gotcha plugs with ultra-light tackle is super exhilarating as these are super-fast explosive fish when they strike the lure. Another great method is to anchor or drift along the school with a large amount of cast netted white bait, typically green backs. I will keep a bucket full or two of white bait without water specifically to chum with and then a live well full of live ones to use for bait. The dead ones are just thrown out around the boat to keep the school of fish close by while the live ones are casted along the edges of the chaotic school of fish. Occasionally I will sprinkle in a net full or two of the live white baits to keep the fish you’ve tricked to hang around your boat interested and feeding.

Besides the mackerel action, the hogfish bite is finally going well enough I would call it ‘good’ instead of just getting better and better. However, this will only improve until the hogfish bite gets ‘hot’ coming soon. Right now we are averaging a half dozen or so on most of our near shore trips and the amount of keeper sized hogfish varies from day to day and depth of water we can reach. We find hogfish from around 30-70ft of water typically but right now were catching more of them and most of those caught are keeper sized closer to 50-70ft of water. Hogfish love live shrimp, live fiddler crabs, sandfleas, or rockshrimp for bait. Keep in mind that fresh dead or fresh dead fiddlers will work as well. Often, because shrimp get used so quickly near shore around the active bottom species you need 20-60 dozen to go out and target hogfish with a group of anglers people will opt for the fresh dead shrimp since they are a little easier on the budget. Also, it’s hard to keep that number of shrimp alive unless you have a fancier live well set up. We will often use our fish box or a cooler to store small bait buckets stuffed with shrimp, while they are not getting fresh water they will not be lively when we start fishing the cold water preserves them nicely and they do live a surprising amount of time in cooler water. This also keeps them fresh as well. Something about the pink more rotten shrimp turns those hogfish off. The more natural colored typically brown or tan or lighter colored shrimp are the better option over the pink shrimp. Also, frozen shrimp seem to work well for chum to get the other fish fed and the hogfish excited but they don’t work well for hogfish bait as they come off the hook easy and they are typically more predominately not fresh. When targeting the hogfish lighter tackle is always better and lighter weight is always better because you want to most natural presentation possible.

We are seeing a decent red grouper bite on the HUB 10hr all day trips we are running right now when fishing around 70-100 foot of water. They love the live bait like pinfish or pigfish but my favorite bait for the red grouper are the cut strips of squid wing cut to mimic an octopus tentacle. The lane snapper action is going very well near shore and were seeing some nice mangrove snapper bite mixed in with the lane snapper too around 80-110ft of water or the deepest near shore waters is the best place to target these great eating snapper and perhaps catch a red grouper or two along the way.

While bottom fishing near shore always have a pitch rod ready! We have been spotting some very large and great eating cobia cruising up to our boats the past week. We had a 60lb cobia last weekend and then another just over 70lb cobia caught this week. They love tail hooked live pinfish on 40-50lb floro leader with a 5ot circle with 30-40lb braid on a 5000-8000 series spinning reel.