St Augustine trip 4-3-11

[Rod Father]

My buddy John just picked up a 24ft. Sea Hunt a couple weeks ago and was wanting to go and try and catch some hoo out by the ledge. Well we didn't get out as early as we wanted but still made it out 60 miles to the ledge around 8:30 AM. We high speed trolled for a couple hours and came accross some hoo tearing through the water feeding on a school of bait fish, we threw everything at them, trolled around, threw, and by with nothing to show, made a big loop to come around again and hooked up with a peanut on a cedar plug way back. Put lures back out and looked back and looked like a Marlin about 100 yards behind the boat, he jumped 4 times and stopped, we think he was feeding on the Dolphin, trolled for another hour with no more knock downs.

We decided to more in to some shollower spots and came accross a real nice looking piece of bottom in 175ft. by now the seas had calmed down which made it easy to get baits down, immediately started pulling up vermillion and porgies as the bite slowed down couple of us started pulling up half of AJ's looks like a shark was getting in on the action, then I hooked into something that almost pulled the rod out of my hands at first I thought it was a big shark but it didn't run like a shark would it just kept trying to jig down on me, I kept thinking anytime now its going to bite threw my leader or a shark is going to bite it in half, well I worked it up and up popped a Warsaw, my first. I've caught many a grouper but this was my first Warsaw.

Well as we all know groupers are closed in the Atlantic so got a couple pics, vented and released, then dropped down again and pulled up a snowy, vented and released, when I got home and looked it up on fwc website and found out I could have kept, man what a stupid mistake. Unless I'm reading this wrong, heres the link: http://myfwc.com/media/628389/2011_jan_sw-chart.pdf

[Rod Father]

Guess I did the right thing, came accross this.

http://sero.nmfs.noaa.gov/bulletins/pdf ... ouper2.pdf

[bodysnatcher]

I think you did the right thing. It's so hard to keep up with all the changes that the make now.

[lamehawk]

sweet looks like a good time