My one fishing goal for this year was to catch a bigger than puppy red. Since I fish inshore 99% of the time, this was going to require a trip to the Harbor at some point. The tides looked good yesterday, slack low around 1700 (so I didn’t have to take a whole day off from work) and the winds were predicted to shift to the SW and be 5-10 kts. Well the tides cooperated but the wind was more like 10-15 kts from the S. My original plan was to try the end of the jetties at dynamite hole by the red buoy. With an outgoing tide and a S wind, the chop was pretty heavy in dynamite hole, so we switched to the backup plan of random spot on the inside of the South Jetty that wasn’t too choppy. Depth was about 12 feet and the current was not too bad. I way overplanned this trip and we probably had about 20# of bait on the boat, menhaden, shrimp, crabs, pinfish, croaker, finger mullet, and big mullet. I anchored up our 23’ center console and we drifted into a great position maybe 25’ feet from the rocks.
We fished four rods with baits on the bottom. I also periodically chummed. Things started off a little slow with the typical toadfish, BSBs, trout and small reds being caught first. Then the smallest rod on the boat went off and it was on. Didn’t take Dad too long to pull in a nice red. Not a huge fish, maybe about 36", but not a puppy drum either. Mission accomplished! Fish was caught on a live finger mullet on a carolina rig on the bottom. We got a few more fish at the jetties, nice bonnethead, huge stingray, and another drum that I lost when my snap swivel broke (I know, I know, why was I using that lousy rig with the snap swivel).
On the way back in, we decided to try the grillage for a few minutes since we were going right by it. Only one other boat out there and they were pulling in a nice red as we moved