Assistant Editor Terry Gibson and Sharon Niemczyk inspect an undersize amberjack hooked on a wreck off Martin County.

What’s with all the small amberjacks these days?

What happened to those big brawlers—the 60-pounders that humbled the proud, entertained guests, made slow days exciting?

I get the feeling you’ve had a few days like this:

A wreck in 180 feet of water, prime AJ season. We had a crew of five, including a young lady game enough to tackle anything.

I offered Sharon Niemczyk a fighting belt, and wished her luck.

We’d passed over the wreck once already, confirming the bearing and range we’d need to set up downcurrent. Next drift would be the one, I told her.

When I said go, she flipped the lever on her standup outfit and let 50-pound braid spool off into the deep blue. A 16-ounce bank sinker on the bottom of a three-way swivel dragged a quarter-pound live grunt to its destiny.

When she hit bottom, Sharon cranked up several turns. She had a look of cautious optimism. An experienced offshore fisher, she knew what a big AJ was capable of, but we’d sold her on the idea of “research.” Sharon’s background is marine biology, and I guess that’s why she agreed to our informal, Tuesday morning project.

The moment the edge of the wreck appeared on the fishfinder, Sharon’s rod doubled. She choked up her grip, arms shaking, rodtip pulsing wildly.

The fight was AJ all the way—the big jacks don’t self-inflate like grouper—but something didn’t seem right. It just wasn’t the same.

Greater amberjacks underwater.

Soon, too soon, up popped Sharon’s amberjack—all of 25 inches. She had scarcely broken a sweat.

In 1985, the late Don Mann, who chronicled the South Florida offshore scene for FS, wrote: “In any month of the year, private and charter craft alike can find action, when the surface trolling gets slow, because the depths of the [Islamorada] Hump are home to resident schools of giant amberjack. These husky battlers are not seasonal. There is no time of year when they are “running.” This hotspot has yielded countless amberjack over 75 pounds, and some over 100.”

The Hump, of course, was (and still is, sort of) AJ central. But many deepwater wrecks and reefs around Florida held similar schools of monster jacks.

A few years later, in 1989, Mann brought us the hint of something amiss:

“Neither Florida nor the federal government imposes any restrictions at all on the taking of amberjack, although regulations are presently being mapped for federal waters.”

What was happening in this time frame was a rapid, unregulated escalation of commercial amberjack fishing: from less than 100,000 pounds per year on Gulf and Atlantic coasts, to a million pounds or more by the early 1990s. The explosion filled in partly where redfish supplies were left out of the notorious “blackened redfish” craze. Reds were mostly taken off the market in 1989, but white AJ fillets were evidently a fine substitute. Recreational effort increased somewhat through the ’80s, apparently following the crash in Gulf kingfish stocks (which, like redfish, had nearly been netted into the history books).

Greater amberjack have never been what we’d call discerning feeders. Where they’re thick, the only real “skill” required of the angler lies in evading them—which is what many grouper and snapper fishers would prefer to do. For decades, landing a big AJ, one 50 pounds or up, was seen as a brutal rite of passage on offshore boats. That or a form of torture for unwitting tourists. Finding AJs was seldom a problem, particularly in spring, March through May, when spawning-grade fish would clot a depthfinder on certain wrecks and reefs.

Over the Islamorada Hump and other AJ gathering areas, commercial “jack boats” outmuscled their quarry with vertical “bandit” rigs powered by electric motors. On shallower reefs, divers began deploying spearguns equipped with explosive charges.

For a while, people took AJs for granted, turning a blind eye toward the sudden rise of market pressure. But a curious thing happened: As stocks bottomed out, sportsmen began waxing nostalgic for the big ocean brawlers.

“I remember one family who fished with me in the mid ’80s,” recalled Capt. Bouncer Smith, a Miami charterboat captain. “We’d start every trip with three outfits, 30- to 50-pound test. I’d give ’em each a 4- or 5-ounce bucktail; they’d all line up on the railing, each drop a bucktail, jig and wind, and all the rods bent over. When they’d caught 25 AJs, they’d finally lay down on the deck and beg not to catch another one. By that time they wouldn’t mind waiting for a sailfish bite.”