Dropper tail behind a diamond jig hooked a gray tilefish for Rob Delph.

At our next spot, a wreck in 375 feet, we were drifting off the wind, the eastbound current a trickle. Rob and Billy both hooked up to snowy groupers on our first pass. Ralph set up the next drift and told us when to drop. We used standard jigging methods, applying thumb pressure to the line, working the lure once or twice as it dropped, waiting for it to hit bottom. That wait lasted more than a minute, then nearly two minutes, and my anticipation cranked up. If it gets a steady pull, Ralph said, kick it into gear and reel tight. Ninety percent of the hits occur on the bottom. I kept waiting. Line kept running out.

“You don’t have to jig up and down so hard to get the attention of these fish as you do when you’re using pure artificials for muttons and black groupers,” he told me. That’s why he calls the technique “deep pulling” rather than jigging.

“You want to present the bait over and over at the right depth. If you don’t get hit on the first drop, raise it and let it fall again. They’ll take it into their mouth to investigate it, and that’s when you strike.”

Finally, my jig hit bottom. I tightened the slight slack, lifted my rod and felt a telltale pull.

“Once you get them coming up,” he said, and I did, “you need to keep pulling steadily,” and I did, “because the heavy jig exerts downward pressure which might help it dislodge from the fish’s mouth. Beyond that, your only danger to getting them in safely are the sharks—makos, hammerheads and threshers—that might come along and take a whack at them.”

My snowy, a good 10-pounder, made it past the sharks to come aboard.

Unbaited jigs have a lot of advantages: less mess, more sporty, and they don’t attract bites from sharks, which rely on scent to feed and are attracted to jigs with cut or whole bait.

At the stern, for the first time Rob tried a heavy, bright diamond jig that one of his customers had brought down from New England, where they use them for cod. It worked like a charm on the snowies.

In fact, Ralph first discovered the super-deep techniques on his forays to fish in New England, where “jigging for cod in 350 feet is standard,” he says. Decades ago he brought these tactics home and adapted them to the local fishery.

Snowies in the area range from a few pounds up to 45, Ralph said. While bag limits on grouper apply, there is no size limit on this species because once you raise them from the deep their swim bladders are blown. The snowies we caught that day averaged about eight pounds, and Rob placed them in his boat’s coffin box filled with a slurry of ice and water to chill-kill them, which “doubles the life of the fish on the table,” Ralph told me later. That’s worthwhile, because snowies have the delectability of other coldwater species, like halibut, that range farther north.