GULF OF MEXICO - These days, most fishermen would consider themselves lucky to catch a legal-sized red grouper.
"Right color, wrong species," Ed Thompson said as he tossed the fish into the icebox. "We'll keep looking."
Thompson, a veteran skipper who ran head boats for nearly two decades before becoming a private charter boat captain, was looking for one fish and one fish only on this sunny spring morning: red snapper.
The recreational season had been open for just a few days, and Thompson took his employer's 65-foot Viking, Justice, out to deep water in search of the elusive gamefish.
"At one time, red snapper was the big fishery in the northern Gulf of Mexico," Thompson said. "But then for a while they all but disappeared."
Federal officials blamed overfishing by commercial and recreational anglers. Biologists conducted study after study and eventually concluded that the real culprit was not fishermen's hooks, but shrimpers' nets.
It was determined that millions of juvenile red snapper were killed indiscriminately each year in commercial shrimp trawls, then discarded as bycatch.
Federal officials subsequently started requiring that commercial shrimp boats begin using bycatch reduction devices to help reduce the juvenile red snapper being needlessly killed.
"By all indications, it looks like red snapper are on their way back," said Phil Steele, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in St. Petersburg. "It looks like the regulations are helping."
Thompson, who once ran party boats out of Hubbard's Marina on John's Pass, spent years lobbying federal officials on behalf of the recreational fishing sector.
"There was a time when you just couldn't find red snapper offshore," Thompson said. "Then one winter they just started flowing in."
Thompson remembers one trip in particular. "We had 60 people on the boat and ran 48 miles straight out of John's Pass," he said. "Every person fishing aboard that day caught their limit."
Red snapper are opportunistic bottom feeders like their cousins, the prized mangrove snapper, or "mangoes" as they are called by many bay area anglers.
Anglers will find red snapper over rocky bottom or structures such as wrecks and artificial reefs, much like other sought-after bottom dwellers such as red and gag groupers.
"I have found red snapper as shallow as 90 feet," Thompson said. "But here on the west coast of Florida, the fish tend to move deeper as the water gets warmer."
Locating large schools of red snapper is only half the battle. The fish are notorious nibblers and expert bait stealers. While red snapper will eat just about anything, squid and dead fish, particularly Spanish sardines, are the bait of choice.
"Don't try to set the hook when you feel a bite," Thompson said. "You have to reel down first and get the slack out of the line before you try to lift it off the bottom."
Fishing in deep water, especially for sneaky fish like snapper, is more art than science. Anglers develop what could be called a "sixth sense" that lets them know a bite is coming before it happens.
"Your bait isn't going to be down there too long before it gets hit," Thompson said. "So drop it down, when it hits bottom, bring it up a couple of cranks then get ready."
As my first bait hit the bottom, I followed Thompson's instructions. But on the second turn of the handle I felt a slight twitch, as if the bait had dragged against a piece of soft coral.
"Reel it up," Thompson aid. "Your bait is gone."
I did as instructed and discovered that my double-hooked bait had been deftly removed.
"Dang," I said. "These fish do have a light bite."
As good anglers do, I watched the other fishermen for a few minutes to try to determine what I was doing wrong.
"See, Tomalin, this is how it is done," said Steve Yerrid, the boat's owner, holding up a fat red snapper.
"Aha, Snappersaurus," angler Ernie Rubio said, commenting on the size of Yerrid's catch.
Sufficiently humiliated, I dropped another bait, counted to five, then started reeling frantically. Seconds later, I felt the weight of the fish as it tried to swim back to the rocky bottom. "There you go, Tomalin," Yerrid said. "That's the way you do it."
In less than an hour, all the anglers had caught their limit of red snapper, an accomplishment that would have been a dream 10 years ago, when Thompson first began lobbying federal officials on behalf of snapper stocks.
"Now we can fish for something else," Thompson said. "How about grouper."
