Florida third report - smooth puffer
 

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!

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

Cool, thanks for the report. that is such a cool fishery. What depths are you guys working in off the coast there?

P.S. Is that an Eddyline that Ally is dragging down to the water? If so, have you paddled it and how was it?

Thanks, appreciate it. All of the artificial reefs were 35 ft. As a rough approximation, in my Garmin screenshot if you can see dark reef it's 10-15 ft, if you can't it's 20-25 ft, and once it transitions to Google Earth's depth map it's a constant 35 ft.

Yes on the Eddyline. I've paddled it once - it's much lighter than my Trident. If you paddle hard you can get it up to 5 mph very quickly, but it doesn't track as well, and it does kind of a weird shudder when you go through the surf or over large boat wakes. It's great for the intercoastal, but I wouldn't recommend it for open ocean.

Nice Variety! By the time you get down to where I fish(Boynton to Nth Miami), there probably won't be any new species left for you to catch! Blue runners make a good slow trolled bait, but be aware that they are notorious for swimming back to hide under the kayak when hooked.

I hope the accuracy of the public reefs is better up Nth than it is near me. Some of the wrecks are non-existent, others are hundreds of feet away from advertised locations. Not a big deal for a boat, but pretty frustrating on a kayak.

https://strikelines.com/public-reefs/

That looked like a very enjoyable day on the water and you found an interesting variety of fish. Lots of nice markings and coloration. Looking forward to the next one.

Cool puffer