After a cold front sweeps across South Florida in November, Capt. Abie Raymond knows that it’s time to fish for mutton snapper.
Now is when the tasty snappers gather on reefs in shallow water to take advantage of the reduced water clarity caused by the wind and waves. The limited visibility allows the sharp-eyed muttons to aggressively feed on ballyhoo, a baitfish that is plentiful this time of year.
“When you get a northwest wind, a little cold-front wind, and you get that north swell that creeps down and splits the gap between the coast of Florida and the Bahamas and agitates the bottom, all the way into the first reef especially, you’ll get this milky water in there,” Raymond says. “It’s just sediment in the water, and it makes the ballyhoo so much easier for the muttons to catch. Once that water gets dirty, they can ambush them way easier.
“You can catch muttons decent on the clear days, but when you’re sitting in a boat that’s anchored, it’s so much better when the water’s a little bit dirtier.”
The first step in catching mutton snapper for Raymond, whose Go Hard Fishing (gohardfishing.com and @abie_raymond) runs out of Bill Bird Marina in Miami Beach, is to catch ballyhoo. As he drives his 28-foot C-Hawk center console south from Haulover Inlet to Key Biscayne, he looks for the baitfish jumping out of the water.
When he spots “showering” ballyhoo, he anchors near a patch reef in 20 feet or ties up to a mooring ball on a reef and puts a block of frozen menhaden chum in a fine-mesh chum bag. That way he doesn’t “over-feed” the ballyhoo.
His preferred way to catch ballyhoo is with an 8-pound Shakespeare Ugly Stik rod with a 2500 Penn Spinfisher reel. To the end of the 8-pound monofilament line, he ties a tiny No. 20 gold hook baited with an even tinier piece of frozen shrimp, then he floats it back to the baitfish, which pick the offering off the surface. He uses a de-hooker to drop the ballyhoo into the livewell without touching the baitfish.
With plenty of bait, Raymond anchors near patch reefs in 10 to 30 feet of water from Cape Florida in Key Biscayne to North Key Largo. Then he puts the same ground menhaden he used for the ballyhoo in a chum bag with larger mesh and puts out two ballyhoo, one on each side of the boat.
The baits are hooked on ½- or ¾-ounce jigs. Raymond prefers Hookup Lures jigs — chartreuse is his favorite color, but pink and white also are effective — and says Troll Rite jigs work well. He breaks off the ballyhoo’s bill with an upward snap and runs the jig hook through both of the bait’s lips and through the front of its skull to keep the hook in place.
The ballyhoo are fished on 7-foot, 20-pound Ugly Stik rods with 7500 Penn Spinfisher reels spooled with 20-pound monofilament line and four-foot, 30-pound fluorocarbon leaders. (The dirty water and light mono allow Raymond to use shorter leaders compared with anglers who use 30-foot leaders for wary muttons.) He ties a four-wrap spider hitch in the main line and attaches that to the leader with an eight-wrap no-name or Yucatan knot. He attaches the jigs with an improved clinch knot.
Unless he has patient anglers, Raymond leaves the mutton outfits in the rod-holders.
“The reason I have them sit in the rod-holder is because they need to be real still,” he explains. “Customers have a tendency to want to wind and wind and wind. The rod-holder doesn’t have that tendency.”
Patience also is essential for letting the chum attract the snapper, as long as there is some current. As Raymond notes, “The longer you can sit on one of those patch reefs and wait to get a quality fish or two, the better. If you can allocate about two hours at one patch reef and let that chum really get established and let those fish really settle in and come running from all the other patch reefs, a lot of times you’ll do better. If you don’t have current, you give it half an hour, 40 minutes and you move on to the next one.”
While waiting for the muttons to show up, Raymond has his anglers fish some lighter spinning rods with strips of ballyhoo and drift the baits back in the chum slick for yellowtail snappers. Or he’ll have his anglers fish fresh dead shrimp on the bottom to catch porgies, hogfish, groupers, and yellowtails.
As good as the fishing can be this time of year, Raymond typically has the patch reefs to himself because so few anglers realize that mutton snapper can be caught in such shallow water.
“Most people just run right past that stuff,” says Raymond of when schools of ballyhoo jump out of the water as they’re being chased by the snapper, along with hungry sailfish and dolphin. “It’s usually happening in 20 to 60 feet of water and most people think that’s probably bonitos in there, that’s probably mackerel in there. Not this time of year. Most of the big muttons I caught last year were in less than 70 feet of water.”
So instead of going deep for mutton snappers, follow Raymond’s game plan and you’ll come home with enough fish for several delicious dinners.