It is that time of year when the fishing in Port Aransas heats up with the weather. We had some nice warm days overr the last 10 days, and the wind even cooperated for a good number of those days.
Offshore Fishing Report: The boats heading offshore deep sea fishing have been heading out to the rocks and the rigs about 35-45 miles offshore. On the rocks, most of the catch consists of kingfish, sharks bee liners and plenty of red snapper. Unfortunately, the red snapper must be released due to it not being red snapper season. The word from the captains is that you can not get away from the red snapper anywhere you want to fish. Captain Brian Phillips of the Mojo said that he had 10 pound snapper feeding on the surface out at the rocks. All they wanted to do was catch some kingfish, but had to avoid the snapper. The amberjack and ling bite has been very good as you can see from the pictures below taken of the Iced Down catch captained by Nate Forbes. The Iced Down also caught some good grouper and African Pompano. These fish seem to be around in good numbers through May and will still be caught throughout the summer.
A couple of boats the Mo Azul with Captain Peter Young and the High Bid with Captains Brian Cody and Aaron Chambers made overnight trips and were rewarded with a large number of blackfin tuna. The High Bid stayed out the following day and caught some amberjack, ling, kingfish and beeliners. There is also as many as you can reel in jackfish and horse eyed jacks that were caught and released.
Captain David Bujnoch of Third Coast Charters is a new addition to the fleet and has the fastest boat with the very comfortable 38 Fountain. This boat can make it up to 65 mph when the seas allow. He made it out for a quick 8hr trip and caught kingfish, jackfish, beeliners and sharks. He also had to release numerous red snapper.
All of the charter boats seem to have had an encounter at some point in their trips this spring with the extremely hard fighting and very tasty Mako shark. It seems that there are a decent number of them around and they are very willing to take away your 40 pound amberjack, tuna or wahoo. Even the Mako knows what fish taste best.
It will only be about a month until the blue water from the south gets within range of the Port Aransas fishing fleet, and with it comes the dolphin, wahoo, blue marlin, white marlin and sailfish. It seems that the best blue marlin bite has been around the month of June. This bite has been as close as 40 miles the last few years, so take advantage of it and get out there fishing.
Bay Fishing: With the warmer and sunnier days, the bay fishing in Port Aransas has taken off. The guides are getting more redfish than the last few weeks and limiting out there customers. THey are also targeting some black drum which are in good numbers and if you want to add to the catching, the sheephead are still around. It will not be long before the water temps get right for the trout to start showing up.
Flounder Gigging: Captain Tray Clark made it out this last week and although the flounder were not yet coming back into the bays yet, he managed a couple flatties but he did get 100 pounds of sheephead and black drum to make for a very good bag of fillets.
It is all starting to heat up, so get down here and take a break fishing in Port Aransas Texas.