By Steve Waters
After a cold front sweeps across South Florida in November, savvy anglers know that it’s time to fish for mutton snapper.
That’s when the tasty snappers gather on reefs in shallow water to take advantage of the reduced water clarity caused by the front’s blustery winds. The limited visibility allows the sharp-eyed muttons to aggressively feed on ballyhoo, a baitfish that is plentiful this time of year.
The northwest winds that accompany a cold front create waves that stir up sediment from the bottom, which turns the water milky. That makes the ballyhoo much easier for the muttons to catch.
The first step in catching mutton snapper is to catch ballyhoo to use as bait. The easiest way to locate the baitfish is to drive your boat along the beaches from Boca Inlet to Boynton Inlet and look for ballyhoo jumping out of the water.
When you see “showering” ballyhoo, anchor the boat near a patch reef in 20 feet of water or tie up to a mooring ball on a reef and put a block of frozen menhaden chum in a fine-mesh chum bag.
The chum attracts ballyhoo to the back of your boat. You can catch the baitfish with a spinning rod spooled with 8-pound monofilament line. Tie on a tiny No. 20 gold hook and bait it with an even tinier piece of frozen shrimp, then float it back to the ballyhoo, which pick the offering off the surface. Use a de-hooker to drop the ballyhoo into a livewell so you don’t have to touch them.
With a few dozen baits, you can then look for coral reefs in 10 to 30 feet of water anywhere off Palm Beach County and anchor nearby. Put the same ground menhaden chum that you used for the ballyhoo in a chum bag with larger mesh, and cast out two ballyhoo, one on each side of the boat.
The baits can be hooked on half- or three-quarter-ounce jigs. Chartreuse and pink-and-white are effective colors. Break off the ballyhoo’s bill with an upward snap and run the jig hook through both of the bait’s lips and through the front of its skull to keep the hook in place.
Fish the ballyhoo on 7-foot, 20-pound spinning rods spooled with 20-pound monofilament line and four feet of 30-pound fluorocarbon leader. (The dirty water and light mono allow the use of shorter leaders compared with anglers who use 30-foot leaders for wary muttons.)
Unless you are patient, it’s best to leave the outfits in the rod-holders. Anglers who constantly reel in line, whether a little or a lot at a time, rarely get mutton bites.
Patience also is essential for letting the chum attract the snapper, as long as there is some current. The longer you can sit on a patch reef and wait to get a quality fish or two, the better.
If you can stay about two hours at one patch reef and let the chum get established and have the muttons settle in and come running from all the other nearby patch reefs, you’ll usually catch more fish. If you don’t have current, stick around for 30-40 minutes and if you’re not getting bites, move on to the next patch reef.
While you wait for the muttons to show up, you can fish with some lighter spinning rods baited with strips of ballyhoo and drift back the strips in the chum slick for yellowtail snapper. You can also drop fresh dead shrimp on the bottom to catch porgies, hogfish, grouper and yellowtails.
Outdoors writer Steve Waters can be reached at steve33324@aol.com.
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