Added on Thursday, July 2, 2009  Fish Post

Groupers Take A Swell Ride 2009

“I like to send down the squid and minnows on these small hook rigs first,” Capt. Ken Mullen explained to us as we began our first drops to the bottom 105’ below the boat. “Even when you’re losing baits, it’s getting the feeding activity going down there. It’s like putting out the chips and stuff at a barbeque. The kids are gobbling them down, and eventually that’s going to get the big guy hungry and off the couch and looking for a meal.”

Ken, who runs Swell Rider Sportfishing out of Wrightsville Beach in the summertime, had given Gary Hurley, Eddie Hardgrove, and I each a conventional bottom combo spooled with braided line. Gary’s and Ken’s bore “chicken rigs,” traditional two-hook bottom rigs with smaller 4/0 hooks. Eddie and I, perhaps indicative of our personalities, had opted for the larger single hook grouper rigs. A cutting board behind the leaning post of Ken’s 23’ Kencraft Sea King played host to a pile of chunks of squid wings, and a bag of mixed minnows (sardines, cigar minnows, and small mackerel) lay in a fish basket in the cockpit.

As we sent our baited rigs to the bottom, my anticipation was peaking even before my 12 oz. weight hit the seafloor below. There’s very little I like more than grouper fishing, and the show on Ken’s Furuno sounder as we’d drifted the area while establishing our anchor course made it clear that there was some life in the neighborhood.

“This side’s just the bottom 9’ of the water,” The captain had explained, gesturing to the left side of his fish finder. “That zoomed in view lets you really see what’s going on down there.”

It had looked like plenty was going on as Ken readied the anchor and positioned us above the bottom structure, and as Gary, who occupied the gunnel real estate to my left, snapped his rod tip up sharply, a deepening bend in the rod confirmed it. Gary had his fish off the bottom, but it definitely wasn’t coming to the boat willingly.

Aided by the speedy 6:1 retrieve ratio reels that Ken uses, Gary soon had the fish within sight. And, moments later, he was swinging a pretty scamp grouper over the Kencraft’s rail. Many fishermen consider it a jinx to land one of the target species immediately after beginning fishing, but when going grouper fishing and a grouper is the first thing in the boat, I consider it a great omen. Gary’s scamp wasn’t huge, but it was definitely above the 20” minimum size, and with a legal grouper in the boat less than five minutes after we came tight on the anchor line, everyone aboard was excited.

While Gary was battling his scamp, the sardine I’d pinned to my rig was unceremoniously stolen by an unseen bottom dweller, and I burned the rig back to the surface (re-baiting after a bait theft is another time the fast retrieve reels seem invaluable). A squid chunk had fooled Gary’s scamp, and I quickly hooked one of the larger chunks and sent my rig plummeting back to the live bottom we were fishing.

Frustratingly, this next bait was stolen as well, and as I re-baited, I noticed that Ken was up on the bow with a substantial bend in his bottom stick. He soon had a red grouper that was well over the legal size laying on deck. Clearly, the depthfinder hadn’t been lying.

Noticing me swing and miss on yet another unseen fish, the captain explained his hook-setting method.

“When you get a bite, just start to reel really slowly,” Ken told me while Gary swung a double header of a grunt and a pinkie (red porgy) over the rail. “Once you feel the fish’s weight, then set the hook and you’ll have him.”

The lesson took hold a bit, as I reeled in a sizeable pinkie on my next drop, but not the grouper I’d been looking for. When I turned to unhook the porgy into a waiting fish basket, I noticed Eddie’s rod was doubled over and he was struggling to move an unhappy fish from its bottom home. Grunting as he turned the reel handle, beads of sweat broke out on Eddie’s forehead as the fish dug for the seafloor (possibly due to the 90 degree heat, but I prefer to attribute them to the unruly fish). After the battle stalemated a bit longer, he finally turned his fish. A few moments later, Ken grabbed a gaff as a much bigger red grouper materialized in the clear water below the boat. He sunk the gaff under the red’s chin and brought it aboard as I missed yet another fish (this one biting much more like a grouper than the incessant nibbling previous baits had met). Eddie’s red was pushing the 10 lb. mark, and there was no need to break out the measuring board before celebrating another keeper in the boat.

“The tide’s slowing up,” Ken said as we dropped more baits to the bottom and hopefully the many hungry grouper waiting below. “That usually messes up the bite, and it means the wind will push us around and off the piece of bottom we’re trying to work.”

Sure enough, after the captain’s announcement, we caught a few more grunts, pinkies, and undersized beeliners (vermillion snapper), but the grouper seemed to have stopped feeding. After 10 minutes without a grouper bite, Ken was quick to pull the plug on the spot that had seemed so promising.

“We’re going to make a little move offshore,” Ken explained after telling us to reel up and stay up. “A lot of guys say I don’t have a lot of patience because I’m always moving, but that’s where the success comes from. You pick up a few fish off this piece of bottom, a few fish off that one, and before you know it, you’ve got a box full of fish.”

After hauling in the anchor, we made a short run offshore, stopping at a system of ledges 35 miles off Masonboro Inlet.

“I think the tide’ll be running a little harder out here,” he told us as he backed off the throttles of the twin 175 Hp Suzuki’s powering the boat. “We’re going to drift this for a minute to see what’s going on down there.”

We baited up with cigar minnows, then sent our rigs to the bottom again, but Ken had made a decision about the area by the time Gary set the hook on the first grunt that sniffed his squid.

“Look at this bottom,” Ken said, pointing again to his depth sounder. “This whole thing is just loaded. We’re anchoring.”

After we drifted back on the anchor, it didn’t take Eddie long to boat another fat red grouper that went straight into the box with no need for measurement. Ken followed with another while I continued to repeat my swing and miss routine. I’d have gone down on three pitches in the batter’s box in a ballgame, and these were solid bites, the sort that elicited some not-so-kind words when I failed to connect.

Finally, I followed Ken’s advice, getting a hard strike and reeling gently until the rod bent over before setting the hook with a strong yank. This fish had substance, and the hard digs straight for the bottom had me thinking grouper. Sure enough, when I eventually turned the fish and brought it within view, I was greeted with another stout red grouper. Finally vindicated with a grouper of my own, I was feeling a little better about failing to capitalize on my previous strikes.

Gary and Ken each landed another scamp before the bite slowed again, and like the last spot, Ken was quick to make a move when the bite slowed down.

At our next spot, a live bottom area a short distance offshore in 115’, we again baited up with cigar minnows and squid, and Eddie was quick to add another red grouper to his mounting tally.

I caught a few more grunts, and then sent another sardine down.

“Dolphin—there’s a dolphin! He swam that way,” Gary shouted, pointing behind the boat just in the direction the current was carrying our weightless light-line. While I didn’t see the fish when he did, I saw it moments later when it leaped clear of the water with our light-lined cigar minnow in its mouth. Gary picked up the spinning combo as the rod bearing the minnow bent over and the dolphin began scorching line from the drag.

The fish took to the air again and again, and took Gary to the bow following it. I’d been paying more attention to the colorful dolphin than my bottom rig when my sardine was rocked by one of the hardest strikes I’ve ever felt on a fishing rod.

I felt I’d finally mastered Ken’s hooking technique, but this fish gave me no opportunity for gentle reeling as it inhaled the bait and muscled away from me. I was pretty sure it was hooked when the fish bent the rod to the handle and pulled me down towards the gunnel, powerless to do anything but hang on to my rod.

I was finally able to lift the rod a bit, but the fish gave no quarter whatsoever, and it was an agonizing 10 or so seconds of hanging on while my adversary’s tail thumps shook my entire body. Eventually I was able to get a few wraps of line of the spool, but the creature below made every handle turn a compound movement as I lifted the rod, gained a foot or two of line, and was time and again taken back to the gunnel and reminded of the fish’s strength.

This time, I was the one pouring sweat and grunting. Eventually, the battle turned in my favor, and several minutes after it bit, I had the mystery brute moving in my direction. At my first glimpse of the fish, I though it was a shark simply because it was so long, but a few more handle turns showed me a big gag grouper.

Ken chin-gaffed the stout gag and put it on the deck while I tried to recover from the battle.

“That’s definitely the biggest grouper I’ve ever hand-cranked before,” I managed to get out between panting breaths. The gag measured 35”, and I was pretty sure that in Ken’s terms, the big guy had gotten off the couch.

The battle had made me completely forget about Gary’s dolphin, which Ken was soon planting a gaff in after it took Gary on a few laps around the boat. When I looked back to Eddie, his rod was doubled over, too, and he soon put another big red grouper on the deck.

With a nice gaffer dolphin, a big gag, and a well over-legal-red grouper all hitting the deck inside of two minutes, we were all getting pretty worked up.

Apparently satisfied with how worked up the fish were, Ken broke out some new baits, Boston mackerel over a foot long.

“Here, try these,” he said, cutting the big Bostons in half and handing them to us.

The Bostons proved effective, and we decked several more red grouper, all well above legal size, in our next few drops. The action was fast enough that I’m not sure who caught exactly what, but we were looking at a very nice box of fish by the time the bite finally died off.

True to form, it didn’t take long without a grouper hookup before Ken was talking about another move.

“I think we’re going to make a run about 10 miles inshore and try some bottom that has been a really good summer spot for me,” he said as we holstered our rods and readied to pull the anchor. “I haven’t been to these spots since last summer, but there could be some really nice sea bass and scamps in there.”

After making the run, we were circling a series of GPS numbers on a live bottom area less than 30 miles from Masonboro Inlet when Ken saw something exciting on the depthfinder. A large hump on the bottom quickly dropped off from 85’ to over 100’, and the red, yellow, and green splashes on the screen screamed life.

“We just ran over that. We’re not quite to my spots yet,” Ken said, again urging us to look at the lit-up scene on the bottom machine. “Looks like it might be a wreck.”

Dropping a few sardines and cigar minnows, we hooked some grunts and a sea bass before Eddie doubled up on what turned out to be a nice, 10 lb. class gag. The captain gave us the green light to drop the Boston mackerel after seeing Eddie’s grouper, and it wasn’t long until I had another hard bite.

Reeling slowly until I felt weight and then setting the hook, the fish took one bulldogging charge and found some structure.

“He rocked me up,” I said, grunting and pulling with all my 240 lbs. of might to no avail.

“Slack up on him and see if he’ll swim out,” Ken said after watching me pull and assessing that my brute force technique wasn’t working.

I did, but this battle was not to be won, and I ended up pulling the hook a few minutes later when I returned to my heavy handed approach. As I reeled up to re-bait the rig, Gary repeated my performance, hooking up only to find a near-instantaneous rock-up. His fish also won the battle, and kept Gary’s rig as a souvenir when the line broke a few minutes later.

Gary’s keen eye soon saw another dolphin behind the boat, and this one was also more than willing to take our light-line bait. I was first to the spinning rod this time, and battled a small gaffer dolphin to the boat as quickly as I could, wanting to fire another bait into the depths in search of the grouper who’d defeated me earlier.

Just after I caught the dolphin, Gary hooked up again, and this time brought a near twin of Eddie’s gag to the surface after an intense, but brief, subsurface tug of war.

Ken was satisfied that the inshore move had been a good call after seeing Gary’s fish, and even more so when I caught another stout gag moments later.

Gary continued his knack for spotting dolphin behind the boat, pointing out another one just before it ate our light-line bait and joined the previous mahi in the box.

Whether or not a wreck was in fact what laid below us, the bottom had some serious structure to it, as Gary, Eddie, and I repeated the strike/hookup/instant rock-up routine a few more times, managing to land a few grouper in between the battles we lost.

“I thought grouper were supposed to quit biting when you lost one?” Gary queried the captain. “Not always, especially if they’re biting like this,” Ken replied.

We continued bombing the bottom at the spot for another quarter-hour before making the call to head in after I landed a final fish, a fat red grouper as heavy as our last few gags, at the buzzer.

With the Kencraft’s starboard fish box full, we cruised back to Wrightsville Beach with grins on our faces, some seriously tired arms, and 15 grouper in the box. The only ones we’d had to measure were three scamps—every gag and red was well above the legal minimums.

If serious bottomfishing is something you enjoy, it’s Capt. Ken Mullen’s specialty, and a trip with him should prove both a workout and a learning experience for even experienced anglers. Ken runs out of Atlantic Beach much of the year, shifting his focus to Wrightsville in the summertime, and he offers Gulf Stream and other charters in addition to bottom fishing trips.

Give him a call to talk about a charter at (910) 200-2502, or check out www.swellriderfishing.com for more information.