Being in the slow season for charter fishing combined with the snapper closure and the seasonal grouper closure, I decided to follow the kingfish south. I fished the Northeast Grounds between Sebastian and Fort Pierce, Fl for a couple days. There were bunches of large schools of fish seemingly everywhere… The problem was the fact that the fish were not cooperating very well. Take your pick from a laundry list of excuses: 1. It was a full moon, 2. There were over a hundred boats trying to fish a four square mile of ocean, 3. The porpoises and sharks were continuously harrassing the schools of kings, etc… I managed to scratch out a limit late in the afternoon the first day, but the next day was a different story. It seemed there were even more fish, but they all seemed to have lockjaw. Oh well, I caught maybe a dozen or so and threw in the towel and trolled back to canaveral.
The biggest problem with deep sea fishing is the decision making capabilities of the idiots at the National Marine Fisheries Service. It is more like a fisheries dis-service. They use extremely flawed data to falsely determine that a stock of fish is overfished. They then use this irrational determination to close healthy, viable fisheries while they hide behind the subtext of the Magnuson Act. We are currently still under the red snapper closure, which everyone knows is a huge steaming pile of sh$#! The red snapper is probably one of the healthiest stocks of fish in the South Atlantic! I have never even seen numbers of snapper like this since I started fishing offshore when I was a teenager (twenty five years ago)! In addition The geniuses at NMFS have closed grouper for the first third of the year citing a spawning closure. Talk about a steaming pile! The gag grouper migrate to Florida waters early in the winter and spawn in April. There is no reason that we shouldn’t be able to fish for them in January and February, it’s just more of NMFS’s b.s. Chances are, in the next couple months, we will be targeting amberjack and triggerfish for the charter fishing. Unless, the cobia start to make an early appearance in late February.
