The pass is choked in the early morning hours with snook around the bridge lights, dock lights and anywhere the bait and shrimp are stacking up in the moving currents. During the day, the beaches are where most of the snook move over to. However, we are seeing a few of them around the docks still too.

Redfish action around the pass has slowed a bit lately, but a few nice redfish were caught at night around the bridge lights when slowly moving soft plastics along the bottom. During the day, we have seen a few caught around the jetties but its definitely slower than it was in the earlier spring. The back bay area, around the mangrove islands and the flats are definitely a better area to look for the red fish.

Pompano are around the jetties of Johns Pass and still around the surf areas along our beautiful beaches. Working that pompano jig across the sandy bottom areas are a great way to target them or using live shrimp on the bottom is another good option too.

Mackerel have thinned out, but we are still seeing a few along the jetties. Especially when the bait stacks up and comes closer to the mouth of the pass. Seems like earlier morning after sunrise seems to be the most common times on outbound tides.

Sharks are super thick right now around the pass. If you want a chance to bend a rod and have a good fight soaking a bigger dead bait weighted to the bottom with some heavier tackle is a great way to find some black tips, spinners, bulls or bonnet head sharks!

Lane snapper, vermillion snapper, mangrove snapper and a handful of red grouper with the occasional hogfish still is the major theme of our recent ten hour all day trips right now while we are fishing deeper around 70-100ft of water. We are catching a lot of the mangroves and of course the hogfish too using live shrimp. You can also get the mangroves on smaller chunks of cut threadfins and that double snell rig. However, the live shrimp on a knocker rig style set up is the most common option on the ten hour typically. Lane snapper love squid, threadfin or the shrimp and we are catching a ton of them. Vermillion snapper are like the lanes, they are not picky and seemingly are super thick right now out there in this depth range. Red grouper are coming up on the live pinfish and also the dead bait. We do really well using a whole threadfin with a squid chunk.

Mackerel are thinned out near shore too. We were seeing a ton while trolling out on our 5 hour half day trips but we aren’t seeing them much at all. Plus, the kingfish too have virtually disappeared from our near shore waters. Due to this, most of the trolling has ceased on the near shore trips. However, can’t hurt to remember the flat line when possible because you just never know what might swim by especially when fishing deeper near shore waters.

Red snapper season is HERE and boy did we hit the ground running in a big way! We had an incredible first few days of season on the flying HUB 2 twelve hour extreme trips with massive boat limits of red snapper and lots of grouper including fat red grouper, big scamp and fat gag grouper too! The opening day it was more red grouper and scamp, but the second day was a lot of the big gags. Both days were easy boat limits of red snapper before we moved on to focusing on the grouper more.

We had our first red snapper 39 hour trip come in this morning with a massive pile of a boat limit of red snapper! Plus, we had plentiful red grouper, scamp grouper and some nice big gag grouper too much like the Flying HUB 2 twelve-hour extreme.

Unfortunately, we had to cancel today’s 39 hour and twelve hour extreme due to this tropical system, but we are hoping to get back to slaying these fish again Sunday behind the storm! We have a big stretch of calm winds and nice weather to allow us plenty of time to focus offshore in deep water after the red snapper and grouper we are targeting. Remember, gag grouper are deeper this time of year when waters are hot so they are open now but we really only see them consistently out there on our 12 hour extreme, 39 hour or 44 hour trips along with the long range private fishing charters on the Flying HUB 2.