Saturday 3/22/08 Offshore of St Augustine, Fl

We did very well bottom fishing today. We were fishing on Tim's 32' Whaler Outrage. It's a great solid fishing platform.

We started the day catching bait at the Taylor Culverts along with every other charter boat in the fleet. After we filled the live well with cigar minnows and sardines we headed offshore. Our first spot was in 145' of water and we were targeting Scamp grouper. We picked up 3 decent sized scamps right away. But then the pesky sharks moved in and we couldn't keep them off our baits.

After hearing reports of not much current out deeper we decided to head out and catch a few Snowy grouper. We set up shop in 280' of water but the gulf stream was kick a wicked 4 knot current which made fishing tough. We fished for a while and did catch our limit of Snowys.

We headed back in to 23 fathom and picked up a chicken snapper right away but again the sharks moved in. We headed in further to 21 fathom. We hit a few spots with nothing to show for it. We still had a livewell full of bait and it was getting late in the day. We headed north to hit 1 more spot.

Bingo! We immediately started catch red and mangrove snappers right away. We ended up putting 5 nice mangrove snappers up to 10 pounds in the boat and 6 red snapper all around 5 pounds.

Fishing wasn't red hot but we definitely ended the day with a nice box full of grouper and snapper.