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End of the year is a prime time to catch grouper of all colors in South Florida

The reason the grouper season closes for four months beginning on Jan. 1 along the Atlantic coast is because black, red and gag grouper congregate offshore as they go through their mating ritual.

That makes the last few weeks of 2022 a prime time to catch a grouper before the shutdown on New Year’s Day.

“Those groupers will pair up on the reef, one female, one male, that’s why the season closes,” said Capt. Abie Raymond. “As the water gets cooler, they move in shallower.”

Raymond, a Miami Beach native who still lives there and runs offshore and inshore fishing trips out of the Haulover Park charter dock in Miami Beach (www.gohardfishing.com), has been guiding his customers to black and red grouper on a regular basis since Thanksgiving.

“Those fish were all caught bottom fishing from an anchored position, whether with an anchor rope or motoring upcurrent of a shipwreck or natural bottom, which is the old-fashioned way,” Raymond said.

One of the keys to his success this time of year is using live pinfish for bait. Raymond said grouper will eat pinfish year-round, but now is when pinfish migrate through South Florida.

He said the migration usually starts in mid-December, but this year the pinfish started showing up at the end of November. Raymond added that pinfish numbers often peak during the week around Christmas.

For people who like to catch and eat fish, a home-cooked grouper dinner is at the top of their holiday gift list.

When the pinfish are thick, catching a bunch of them to use for bait is fairly easy.

“You’ll see these big, giant golden balls of pinfish in 25 to 150 feet of water. They’ll be on the surface and there’ll be pelicans diving on them,” Raymond said, adding that the baitfish also migrate along the bottom, so he’ll look for a cloud of pinfish on his bottom machine when he doesn’t see pinfish on the surface.

He often finds pinfish around rock piles in 20-25 feet of water, and he casts out a size-6 sabiki rig baited with little pieces of shrimp to catch the baitfish.

After eating a pinfish on a hook, grouper almost always head straight for the shipwreck or coral reef they came from. If they get there, it’s difficult to get them out and usually the angler ends up breaking the fishing line trying. So Raymond uses heavy-duty tackle to allow his anglers to quickly reel a grouper away from the obstacles.

He outfits his customers with a Penn International 50-wide reel on a Capt. Harry’s custom 50-pound straight butt fishing rod. The straight butt allows anglers to try to reel up a grouper stand-up style with a fighting belt. A bent butt rod stays in the rod-holder, and Raymond said that anglers using a straight butt rod also can fight a grouper from the rod-holder.

“I typically leave the rod in the holder because it’s more efficient to winch up a grouper for the average angler,” he explained. And it’s more fun, although more physically tiring, than using an electric reel to pull up a grouper, which some captains, and some anglers, prefer.

Raymond spools his 50 International reel with 100-pound braided main line and he ties a spider hitch at the end of the braid. He then ties a double uni-knot to attach 30 feet of 100-pound monofilament leader.

Instead of closely trimming the monofilament part of the knot, he leaves a three-quarter-inch tag end so he can apply one of his grouper tricks. He uses a small long-line clip to attach a three-foot piece of monofilament with a loop knot that is secured to a bank sinker to that tag end.

“It’s just a squeeze clip, so it can go on and off quickly,” Raymond said. “You slide the clip on the tag end and when the leader comes up as a grouper is being reeled to the boat, you can remove the sinker quickly and wind your fish all the way up to the gaff. It’s a lot quicker than hand-lining in the leader.”

Raymond matches the size of his hook to the size of the pinfish, using an 8/0 to 10/0 heavy circle hook. He anchors or uses the motor to keep his boat upcurrent of the structure he’s fishing so the pinfish get down to where the grouper are. When the sinker hits bottom, he cranks the reel handle twice to position the bait where it’ll get a grouper’s attention.

He added that the strategy also gets the attention of cobia, big mutton snapper, kingfish and big blackfin tuna as well as black, gag, red and scamp grouper, goliath grouper, genuine red snapper, plus almaco jacks and amberjacks.