Skyway bust

Made it out to the Sunshine Skyway last Saturday for one last shot at a pier grouper with my brother before he moves to Virginia. He had his friend Josh come along for the ride.

We hit the pier around 6:00pm. The tide had just changed over from high and was beginning to flow out, so we had to fish the reef side. Ordinarily, I would be excited about fishing the reef side, but we've had more luck fishing the bridge side lately. Regardless, we deployed four grouper rods with pinfish that Reilly had caught for us in Coffee Pot--two live, two cut.

While we waited for a big bite, we used our light tackle poles to fish for more bait. Steve wasted no time in bringing up a couple of big grunts, and I used the sabiki baited with shrimp to pull up a half-dozen pinfish. Josh couldn't catch a cold. As Steve said, it is hard to fish the pier in a full current with twenty yards of line out. By the time you feel the bite, your bait is gone. It takes either a practiced fisherman or a lucky fisherman to catch fish off the pier under those conditions.

After awhile, Steve and Josh walked off to the bait shop and left me to tend the poles. When they got back, they said there was a several hundred pound Goliath grouper that had been caught off the end of the pier. Steve said it was bigger than him. I was troubled to hear that the guy who had caught it was keeping it hooked up and letting it wallow on the surface. Not only is that illegal, it's a good way to kill a fish that you couldn't eat anyway. By keeping it tied up to the pier, he was just being a show off. I don't like show offs.

The grouper poles were silent for a couple of hours, and things were looking bleak until Josh started using the sabiki to pull up scaled sardines. He was psyched to finally be catching fish, and I was psyched to get some good bait. I pulled all the grouper rods in and started re-baiting with the scaled sardines. The rods started going off right away. Steve had a good fight on and pulled in a ... catfish. Bah.

A bit later he had another nice fish on, which turned out to be a big bluefish. I had 30 pound test on that grouper rod, but the bluefish bit right through it right when Steve got it to the surface. All the other rods had wire leader on, so it was just bad luck for Steve. He was disappointed and I was disappointed, but what can you do? That's fishing.

After about an hour of good bites but no more catches, the crabs started getting to the bait, which meant the tide was going slack. Soon the lines were still, so we packed up and headed home around 11:00pm. Not a bad night on the pier, but a tough night for Steve, who was really hoping for a grouper on his last chance outing at the pier.