Late summer is a great time to target snook. With the spawning season over these fish are on their way back into the inlets where they will post up on bait filled grass flats, residential docks and deep mangrove shorelines.
The fall snook season opens Sept 1. The current bag and size regulations for the Gulf of Mexico fishery are as follows: The daily bag limit for snook is 1 fish per person per day with a minimum length of 28 inches and a maximum length off 33 inches.
This weekend’s morning low tides should provide some great inshore opportunities. Casting top-water plugs along shallow drop offs on the outer edges of the grass flats will produce plenty of action from snook, redfish and trout.
With the insurgence of small to medium sized threadfin schools in our shallows, these fish are fattening up after a summer that was thin on baitfish stocks.
These early low tides not only bunch up the bait and the predators, they also offer the coolest water of the day.
The fish are in a much better feeding mood when the water is 84 degrees than when the tide comes in and the shallows begin to virtually boil.
My advice to you is to pull the plug on your inshore fishing trip when there’s more than 2 feet of water on the flats and it’s later than 10:30 a.m. The fish are in no mood to eat at this time.
Offshore fishing was way slow this week inside of nine miles.
In three stops we managed three keeper grouper and a few break-offs from bigger fish. Our main target species was mangrove snapper, which we managed to get none of.
We did manage to have the snapper chummed up more than once but only for a few minutes.
I believe that it is just too hot right now for these depths.
The best reports have been in 70- to 90-feet of water and that’s mainly been for red grouper.
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