Go offshore in the Gulf for big mutton snapper, as they did for the writer, right, and friend Mike Sloan.
October 22, 2024
By Frank Bonifacio
Hidden Gems : Roads less traveled & waters less fished in Florida. Florida Sportsman magazine’s 'Hidden Gems’ project in the August-September 2024 issue featured 14 hotspots for Florida’s hunters and anglers, from the Keys to the Panhandle. This installment highlights mutton snapper fishing offshore at the Elbow in the GulfThe Elbow Can Be a Tricky Place Mutton snapper aren’t common along Florida’s Gulf Coast. But get 70 miles offshore, and they may jump all over your baits.
More Hidden Gems Florida Sportsman's 'Hidden Gems.' I think we go back to the Elbow when gags open,” I said to my friend Mike on that late July afternoon. We were heading home from about 70 miles offshore with a limit of chunky red snappers and painfully looking at pictures of the trophy 42-inch gag that we’d had to release. With Mike’s typical grin and chuckle, he looked at me and said, “That deeper water sounds good to me.” Five weeks later I sent Mike a text, Friday looks good for that Elbow run. He replied back immediately: I’m in! It didn’t take much arm-twisting to get Sam and Rhyne to join up. Just like that we had a crew.
The Elbow can be a tricky place to fish. The current can rip out there in 170 to 200 feet of water. It’s never just a day trip; fuel, bait, rods, rigs, ice, boat mechanical, safety equipment, float plan, and all the other little details must be accounted for. I told the crew to be ready because this was going to be a 14-hour trip leaving my dock by 5 a.m., which means I’m up at 3:30 a.m. and the crew shows up by 4:30 a.m.
Leaving the dock before bait shops open means I need to get my shrimp the day before and keep them overnight. I use a large cooler with a few inches of water and an aquarium aerator. I swap out frozen water bottles about every 6 hours to cool the water. For pinfish I drop my traps at sunrise the day before the trip and then empty them into my bait pens that evening. My staple dead baits are squid and sardines. I brine the sardines in a coarse salt ice bath with baking soda mix for 24 hours and then freeze them flat in one gallon Zip-loc bags. Not only are they rock solid and stay on the hook better, but they are bright and shiny.
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I spent time on my Simrad EVO unit studying the Elbow structure before our trip. I have charts from both CMOR Mapping (West Florida 3D) and StrikeLines (Tampa Offshore) and they are worth every penny. I marked about a dozen spots I wanted to target. I picked our first spot carefully using both cards, as the spot showed sand bottom on both sides of a sharp reef ascending into a high peak ledge.
My boat is a 2017 SeaHunt Gamefish 27 with Yamaha 250s, bought new from ProMarineUSA in St.Petersburg. I keep it well-maintained but I still test my nav lights, radar, and bilge pumps before every trip. The best addition to my boat has been the Rhodan spot lock GPS anchor, aka “Big Dan.” Big Dan has made our trips so much more productive.
The last step in my routine is to tie some rigs. My three main setups are medium spinning, medium conventional, and heavy conventional. My spinner is a 6'6" Teramar with Shimano Saragosa 5000, 20-pound braid with 15 feet of 20-pound fluorocarbon leader tied using an FG knot and with either chartreuse or pink ¾-ounce jig. My medium conventional is a St. Croix Mojo Salt with Shimano Talica 12 with 40-pound braid and 30 feet of 40-pound mono top shot, rigged with a 4-ounce, 40-pound fluoro fishfinder rig with double snell 4/0 circle hooks. My heavy is a St. Croix Mojo Salt with a Talica 20 with 80-pound braid and 30-foot, 100-pound mono top shot with 6-ounce sinker, 100-pound fluoro leader and 7/0 circle hook.
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The writer plotted some likely drops using popular bathymetric cards, then, after fishing, renamed a few accordingly. I had planned to wake up at 3:30 but as usual I was too excited to sleep much, so 2:30 it is (you all know what I’m talking about). Coffee, lower the boat, load bait, rods, ice, bean bags, Busch Lattes, etc. The rest of the crew arrives by 4:30 and they loaded their gear and we left my dock in Indian Rocks Beach at 4:50. We enjoyed a smooth 75-mile run out of Clearwater Pass listening to the good vibes of Stick Figure. We arrived at the first spot in 170 feet just after sunrise and we could see a little show going on below but what really surprised me was how little current there was. We put in Big Dan and started dropping baits.
Mike was first down with his slow pitch jig and he immediately hooked up. When he got it topside, it was about a 22-inch mutton snapper, a special catch on a Gulf trip out here. This was Mike’s first Gulf mutton. Next, I pulled up a keeper on a half a sardine on my double snell rig. Then Rhyne pulled up a 28-incher on a jig-and-shrimp, also his first Gulf mutton. Then Sam hooked up on a jig, too. We’d landed right on a school of muttons on our very first spot! Then Mike’s rod was almost ripped out of his hands. Mike is a legit slayer and when he finally got that fish to the surface we couldn’t believe what we were looking at, a new boat record 33-inch mutton. Unreal!
The taxman must have been watching the show and had enough of it because right after that fish came we had our first shark cutoff. We were still able to land a few more keepers before we had to finally get away from the sharks. All in, we bagged 13 keeper muttons at that spot.
Knowing that the sharks were going to be hanging around the Elbow’s main ledge line, we called an audible and headed to other standalone spots using StrikeLines. I call them “lonesome ledges” because they are usually a small ledge, fracture, or piece of hard bottom away from the main reef. Jackpot! Big gray triggers, jumbo vermilion snapper, and quality mangroves. For the next couple of hours we did the “stick and move” with the Rhodan, picking off some nice fish, including a few fire truck red groupers that we had to “Return em Right” using the SeaQualizer.
Our fish box was really coming together but no gags yet, so we switched to the grouper rods with big pins, and wham! Sam’s rod got slammed and he brought up a thick, 36-inch gag. We all got excited but it didn’t last long because just then we heard the crack of thunder.
Not the kind of weather you want to see. Glancing to the north, we saw dark skies, lightning, and rain. We knew what was coming. All hands on deck! We pulled the Rhodan and secured the gear in record time to get the heck out of there, but even then it was too late. We felt the wind first, then the whitecaps rolled, then came the downpour. It was hot and humid day, so the initial rain felt pretty good, but that changed when it was pelting us at 40 mph. There was no way to outrun it, as it was hundreds of miles long and moving fast, so I set a heading to keep the wind at our stern and we did the best we could with a slow, rolling ride until the brunt of the storm moved past us towards the coast. The Gulf was now a complete washing machine so we decided to head in early, knowing this was not going to be anything like the ride out. I knew our wives were going to be worried, so before we headed back I sent them a message from my SPOT X letting them know we were okay and heading home. I never underestimate how important it is to send that message.
As expected, it took us about three and half hours to get back that day. It was September 8, 2023 and a long line of severe thunderstorms rolled through the Gulf mid-morning and across much of the state. If you go offshore enough times you’ll eventually get caught in a bad storm. I’m always grateful to have an experienced crew that knows how to handle the foul weather and the proper equipment to see us through. The ride home was one of the worst I can remember, but we had Jimmy Buffet playing and we were smiling and laughing while talking about the greatest mutton bite we’d ever had.
