The beginning of the football season marks another seasonal pleasure for South Florida anglers: the fall snapper season.
A variety of snapper — yellowtails, muttons, mangroves, lanes and vermilions — have been showing up on the hooks of anglers drifting over Palm Beach County reefs with dead bait.
McKenzie White, 9, caught a 2.5-pound mangrove snapper on the morning of Sept. 8 while drifting with a multiple-hook guppy rig. She was fishing with captain Corey Engleman on the Jupiter-based Native drift-fishing boat.
The Native anglers also caught yellowtail and lane snapper and two small kingfish that morning while drifting over the reefs in 60 to 70 feet between Lost Tree Village (south of the Juno Beach Pier) and Jupiter Inlet. The kingfish hit triple-hooked sardines on the flat, or unweighted, line.
Engleman sometimes fishes deeper for snapper. It depends on the current. When the current is too strong to hold bottom (he prefers about 1 knot of current but will fish up to 2.5 knots), Engleman moves inshore to find a slower flow.
Engleman’s snapper rig: A dead sardine on a 3/0 or 4/0 circle hook tied to 30- or 40-pound-test fluorocarbon leader. He typically uses 3 ounces of lead over the leader-connecting swivel, but the amount of weight needed varies with the current. So carry plenty of different sinkers and use as little weight as possible to reach the bottom.
Engleman says many anglers run over good snapper fishing spots while racing out to the “edge” in 110 feet or so off Jupiter.
His advice: “Work your way out. Stop and see what the current is doing and make your decision from there.”
Off Lake Worth Inlet, anglers on the Mad Son drift boat based in Riviera Beach have been catching 20 to 25 snapper a trip on dead sardines, captain George Bradbury Jr. said.
Bradbury’s standard drift-fishing rig for the Mad Son anglers: double 4/0 hooks tied to about 5 feet of 30-pound-test leader. He puts 1.5 ounces of lead over the swivel in most conditions.
Mad Son anglers have been catching snapper in 70 to 90 feet from the Lake Worth Inlet north to the Juno Beach Pier — and catching a few blackfin tuna on cedar plugs while trolling to and from drift-fishing spots.
Snapper size limits vary widely.
The minimum size is 8 inches for lane snapper; 10 inches for mangrove (gray) snapper; 12 inches for yellowtail snapper and vermilion snapper caught in the Atlantic; and 16 inches for mutton snapper.
The aggregate daily bag limit for various snappers is 10 fish, but only five mangroves or vermilions are allowed daily. The vermilion snapper season closes Nov. 1.
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Bill Wummer of Palm Beach Gardens and his fishing crew on Spiced Rum III won the Southern Kingfish Association’s Summer Slam tournament held Sept. 7 in Fort Pierce with a 52.29-pound kingfish.
Wummer, fishing with Sherri Beswick, Wayne Beswick, Freddie Joseph and Grant Portier, ran way south into his home waters off Juno Beach to catch the winning kingfish using a live blue runner on a downrigger in 130 feet of water.
Wayne Beswick picked up the rod when the big king hit around 11 a.m. After a 10-minute fight, the Spiced Rum III team gaffed the fish that won the tournament and put them in first place for the season in SKA’s Division 8. Wummer’s team plans to fish the SKA nationals set for early November in Biloxi, Miss.
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Chef Michael Kuckleman, a longtime Palm Beach County angler, will discuss cooking fresh fish and other types of seafood at the Sept. 24 meeting of the Boynton Beach Fishing Club.
The meeting is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. in the clubhouse at Harvey E. Oyer Jr. Park on the east side of Federal Highway south of Gateway Boulevard.
For more information, call 561-707-5660 or go to www.bifc.org.
