Went down to the Gulf Coast for a family vacation (16 of us) last week on a a quiet little beach called Cape San Blas where we’ve been vacationing for about 18 years now (minus a year or two). The beach and water are great and the bottom fishing is better. Booked an overnight trip with Capt. Kenny Lemieux with Doghouse Charters out of Port St. Joe Marina. We’ve fished with Capt. Kenny before and knew to expect lots of reeling and sore arms but our expectations were exceeded once again. We left Tuesday morning around 730, rode out to get bait, moved to the first spot and started fishing about 1130. We had great weather and seas for the trip. This is what it looked like for two days:
Right off we start catching snapper and grouper and put some 26-30" Red Snapper in the Box. The legal limit is 16" but there are such an abundance of huge snapper that we set the boat limit at 26"…to start off. We hit 8 or 10 spots with the rods continually doubled over and lots of fish coming in the boat. Around 5:00 Capt. Kenny comes out of the cabin and lets us know that we already have over half of our limit of snapper and gag grouper. (2 day limit of 4/person). We talk for a few minutes and decide to move out to some deeper water and up our size limit of snapper and grouper to 30". We finished up the afternoon in deeper water catching large snapper, grouper and AJs (which are out of season right now in the gulf) and the fish box was kind of getting full:
We went to the anchor spot for the night over some live bottom in hopes of catching some black snapper but they never really turned on and we were really all too tired to fish any way. Capt. Kenny cooked us some steaks and potatoes that hit the spot and we laid down for a few hours sleep. The next morning was more of the same catching large snapper and groupe