Florida Fishing Trip May 2011

[JAB]

I started to post this as a response to a post by OhShoot in the Shell Cracker thread but decided that it probably strayed far enough afield from the OP to need to be its own thread. I left the OhShoot quote in, though, so my post would make sense.

Bream have much better flavor to me. Crappie texture is very nice, but bland. I actually like stripe (white bass) better than crappie.

But anyway, I've always filleted hand sized bream. I scale and leave skin on, do most all fish this way. Little finger sized fillets are just fine, and the skin keeps them together.

I've done more fishing in the Keys in last 20 years than fresh water; down there, the mainstay "panfish" is the blue striped grunt; it tastes remarkably like bluegill to me, but average about a pound or a tad less, a whopper is over two. I know of no better tasting fish.

- OS

I'm not crazy about stripe/hybrid bass. I don't generally care for 'strong' fish taste (which is probably why I like crappie.) I am not all that fond of catfish. Stripe isn't bad but isn't my favorite. I imagine if the length limit to keep them wasn't 15 inches (at least that was the limit the last time I fished for them), smaller fish would probably make for better eating than the ones I was able to legally keep/eat.

Now, as far as saltwater fishing goes, I have only done that twice. The first time was a few years back on one of the large, group boats out of Panama City Beach (one of Captain Anderson's boats.) We really only caught vermillion snapper and a trigger fish - not too bad beer battered and deep fried but not great, either.

The second time was last week (we went to Panama City Beach and Gulf Shores in the camping trailer for vacation - members of my wife's family went with us to PCB in her grandfather's RV but they stayed there when we went to Gulf Shores.) We found that, with a group our size, we could go on a charter boat for about twenty bucks each more than taking one of the big, group boats. Went with an outfit called Kelley Girl Charters and I caught this amberjack:

this dolphinfish (no, it wasn't a big one but that is the one type fish I have most 'dreamed' of catching):

and we caught several Spanish mackerel:

There were seven of us and we all caught a keeper amberjack (minimum is 30 inches at the fork of the tail - ours were around 32-34 inches), we caught a boatload of mackerel and I caught that one mahi-mahi.

Usually, mackerel is too strong/fishy for me but I had heard that they are pretty good if you cook them the day you catch them but that they don't freeze very well. We kept enough to try and I gave the rest to the crew. After we picked up the processed fish from the dock (I would have processed them, myself, if there hadn't been so much) and got back to the campground, I squeezed juice from a couple of fresh lemons over the mackerel filets and tossed the squeezed-out wedges in a ziplock bag with the fish then left them on ice in the bag for a couple of hours. Grilled them skin-side down brushed with olive oil and hit with just a little salt and pepper and was surprised at how good they were.

We ate part of the amberjack that night, too. I know some folks don't like amberjack (I have read complaints of lots of worms in the meat, though that wasn't much of a problem with these, and they can apparently get really dry/tough if you don't cook them right.) Myself, I think amberjack is just as good as grouper and think of the two as being very similar. Part of the AJ got beer battered and deep fried (the members of my wife's family who were with us prefer that method of cooking fish although they were pleasantly surprised at how much they liked the grilled fish, too - I had taken my outdoor, propane-fuel fryer just in case.) Some of the AJ got brushed with olive oil and seasoned with a blend of my own making that I call my Caribbean blend (similar to a jerk blend but not exactly) - that was my mom's favorite of all.

I also went ahead and grilled the mahi-mahi that I caught. Good blackened mahi-mahi is probably my #1 favorite fish to eat so I hit it with a little olive oil and blackening rub (the blackening rub is also my own concoction) and grilled that up. That was, as I expected, my absolute favorite with the grilled AJ coming in a not too distant second.

To round it out, I made some fries (chips) that I cooked using the pommes frites double-cooking method. Since I was frying and grilling fish at the same time, my sister-in-law helped me keep an eye on the grilled fish (had it on a charcoal grill) while she used the portable gas grill to grill some corn and garlic bread. Here are the results - my dinner plate that night (no corn in the pic - I recently had a couple of teeth pulled and wasn't quite up to eating corn, yet.) A little squeeze of lemon on the fish and some malt vinegar on the 'chips' and this made a pretty good meal:

I took this pic to show the size of the amberjack steaks. Each fish had two of these per side and we caught seven fish. I only cooked three AJ steaks that night so we came back with 25 of them in the camping trailer's freezer. AJ supposedly freezes pretty well so there should be some good culinary reminders of our trip later this summer.

This was our total haul. Not bad for only a four hour trip. We went out fishing for amberjack - the mahi and mackerel were just 'bonus' fish that we caught trolling on the way back from catching amberjack (though catching the mahi made me happiest.) We actually caught more 'keeper' amberjack that this but, as we could only keep one each, we threw all but the largest ones back. Of course, on a trip like this the haul speaks more for the skill of the skipper and deckhand than any real fishing skill on our part. They found the fish, rigged the poles and told us what to do - we just reeled them in (actually, only my brother-in-law and I were able to reel in the amberjack completely unassisted - those things are a fun fight and we helped the others land theirs.):

Edited June 6, 2011 by JAB

[Oh Shoot]

Good little outing and good eating, nice report.

When I was a kid, my dad and I used to go out of Anderson's bottom fishing fleet. That was back when there were plenty of red snapper and grouper...it was nothing to catch 20 or more snapper of 10 lbs and up, and a number of 20#+ grouper. Used to take you way out, 2.5-3 hours each way, 10 hour fishing trip. There was even a 2 am boat where you went 70 miles out or more for Warsaw grouper, electric reels and all that water was so deep.

Used to go out of Carrabelle way back then too, and they put you on even more and bigger fish. There really wasn't much of anything IN Carrabelle back then but fishing docks.

Went out one more time about 20 years ago just for old times sake, heck we must not have gone 7-8 mile off the coast, nothing much but "beeliners" (the vermillion snapper) caught. Could pack away more fish in a couple of good nights lantern fishing at Watts Bar than the whole boat brought back.

Crew back in the day would throw triggerfish back, and they were huge ones back then, too. But they really ARE good eating, just somewhat difficult to clean. I've caught a lot of smaller ones since those days in the Keys, and ate every one. Used to throw the amberjack back too, we'd catch them mostly accidentally near the surface. Yeah, they always said "wormy". Which are just small flukes in the fillets, which you can just flip out when you clean them. Or hell, just cook em up flukes and all, no biggie.

It's sad we've depleted the traditional fish to this extent, but of course it's the commercial endeavor to feed ever larger population that's done it, not sports fishing.

- OS

[Jasongar8]

It looks like yall had a good trip out. A nice bunch of reef donkeys (AJ's). The little chicken Mahi eat very well too. If you find a weedline you can catch chicken Mahi all day long.

OS, I dont know if I believe that the Gulf is as fished out as the FMC and NMFS tries to get people to believe. The captains that I know say that snapper are everywhere. This years snapper season is the shortest in history at 48 days. They say that the quotas are going to be more but we are going to shorten the season because the average snapper size is bigger. This is hurting the charter business in a bad way. Between this and the oil spill a lot of them won't make it.

[Oh Shoot]

It looks like yall had a good trip out. A nice bunch of reef donkeys (AJ's). The little chicken Mahi eat very well too. If you find a weedline you can catch chicken Mahi all day long.

OS, I dont know if I believe that the Gulf is as fished out as the FMC and NMFS tries to get people to believe. The captains that I know say that snapper are everywhere. This years snapper season is the shortest in history at 48 days. They say that the quotas are going to be more but we are going to shorten the season because the average snapper size is bigger. This is hurting the charter business in a bad way. Between this and the oil spill a lot of them won't make it.

It's not "fished out" of course. But it's a shadow of what it once was. You don't have to be a scientist to determine that, just a long time sports fisherman.

Hell, there wasn't even a season on snapper back when, wasn't needed. Used to be red snapper in every grocery store year round. Triggerfish and even amberjack weren't considered worth keeping, now they advertise fishing for them; didn't used to keep beeliners, now that's the main catch for the party boat fleets. Never needed size limits on grouper, 'cause nobody kept what's now classed as undersized anyway, didn't need to. Now folks measure closely just in hopes of keeping one.

I've seen just the inshore fishing in the Keys I've done solo change dramatically in the 20 years or so that I did it every year. On both Gulf and Atlantic sides.

Any skipper down there who claims the fishing is anything like it was 25 years ago and earlier simply wasn't around then. Applies equally to backcountry sport fishing, gulf bottom fishing, Atlantic side offshore reef and gulf stream. Just really a shadow of what it once was.

Species may come and go depending on protection and quotas, but the fact they are even imposed speaks for itself in the matter, really.

- OS