Captain’s Corner for August 8 Dave Zalewski 397-8815

Great fishing exists for offshore anglers who do not wish to make the budget breaking run far offshore. Spanish mackerel, barracuda, bonita and a few kingfish can be found on all of the near shore artificial reefs as long as there is a concentration of bait hovering over the various structures including large culverts, junction boxes, bridge pilings, concrete light poles, and on some of them barges and obsolete military tanks which were placed their by our artificial reef program. Tell tale signs that bait is present are birds diving or seeing the bait being pushed to the surface by predators. Oftentimes these signs will not be present on the surface and it is necessary to search out the cloud of bait by the use of a fish finder.

Two methods are successful when fishing these reefs. The most popular and easiest is to troll small (#0 or #1) spoons 30 feet behind a #1 or #2 planer at a speed of 6 knots. Once a fish is hooked using the MOB button on the GPS will insure a return to where the fish are located. The other is to locate a piece of structure that is holding bait, use a sabiki rig to catch bait and deploy it by use of a flatline.

Tip:

The location of the artificial reefs can be found on most charts and on many websites. The published GPS number is for the center of the reef. These reefs had material scattered all over a rectangular area that was 2000 feet long running north to south and 300 feet wide from east to west.