April 11th I had a private boat trip and this group wasn’t interested in a long boat ride or rough seas so we stayed close in close on the shelf. The shelf is what we call the area between land the continental shelf dropoff over a thousand feet. It was a little rough and we started fishing only 7 miles out. We started out trolling and got one bite but lost him, but while trolling we were marking tons of fish on the upcurrent side. We got set up and started chunking on top of the fish and they responded quickly. We were catching huge backfins on almost every chunk. I was marking some huge yellowfins mixed in with blacks but couldnt seem to get them to bite. The group had blast catching fish like crazy. We kept about 12 and then did some catch and release to save room in the fishbox for other fish. I cut up one of our blackfins and sent down a huge chunk all the way to bottom 450 feet. After some time on the bottom we finally got the bite we were looking for. After a half hour of heavy cranking on the reel, a huge warsaw grouper came to the surface. He ended up weighing 90 lbs when we got back to the dock. We also did a little amberjack fishing and got one on a jig but it was slow and the boys wanted some snapper so we ran north into East Bay and fished a couple rigs before finding the big snapper we were looking for. We kept 10 snapper all between 10-18 lbs plus a few bonus vermillion snapper. Great trip with tons of action.
