Florida third report - smooth puffer

[BenCantrell]

Third Florida report! I'm not thrilled with how infrequent these are. Last year I was getting 2-3 solid sessions in a month, but since I moved to FL I've only made it out 3 times. With that said though, I've enjoyed being on the steep part of the learning curve. The bigger fish will come eventually!



We drove down to Fort Pierce for the 4th. @JohnMckroidJr, we're slowly working our way down to you. The plan was to spend less time looking for new species and focus on drifting or trolling with live baits. I marked half a dozen artificial reefs on my fish finder the night before.

At the first artificial reef we quickly caught Atlantic bumpers. I know they're not good bait, but I sent one down while I worked on finding something better. A half later I finally got a pinfish, which I swapped in.



While I waited for something big to notice the pinfish, I dropped a 2 oz jig tipped with shrimp. It got picked up by a beefy porkfish and then by a white grunt.



After that something stronger hit and actually pulled out some drag on my spinning reel. Ended up being a big smooth puffer!



After the puffer I checked my live bait line and found that the pinfish was gone. Not sure if he wiggled off the line on his own or if something grabbed him without me noticing. Next I sabikied up a blue runner and put him on. He stayed on the line for the next two hours, and I checked him periodically to make sure he was lively (he was). At the end of the day I took him off the hook and let him swim off.

The most frustrating part of the day was not being able to find any of the artificial reefs after the first one. We paddled to the pins I marked, didn't see anything on the fish finder, paddled a few circles around the pin in case it was slightly off, and then gave up and went to the next one.

We wrapped up the day by fishing the shallow reef near the beach. I caught southern puffer, sand perch, cocoa damselfish, slippery dick, and blackear wrasse.





Landing was easy back at the beach, but we had to go about 100 yards north of where we launched to avoid swimmers.



Miles: 8.4
Hours: 5:26
Water Temp: 82 *

* Water temp from https://seatemperature.info/fort-pie...mperature.html