Nature Coast

Permit can be choosy when dining

By ED WALKER
Published June 23, 2007

The summer months are best for targeting permit on the wrecks off West Central Florida. These tasty members of the jack family can be fairly easy to hook if you are properly prepared when you find them.

The most important factor is the bait. Permit do not eat fish; they feed almost entirely on crustaceans and mollusks.

This means if you happen to bump into a school somewhere and do not have the right bait, you probably will not be catching permit. There are few things more frustrating.

Several years ago while fishing for kingfish on the Rube Allyn Reef off Pinellas County, we encountered a giant school of permit milling around on the surface. There were literally hundreds of them; we tried every lure in the tackle box only to be turned down again and again.

Eventually we modified a soft plastic lure to resemble a crab and coaxed one 25-pound permit into biting. As we lifted the fish into the boat, the jig body fell off and that was it for us for the day.

We vowed that the next day we were going back with a live well full of crabs, and the proper tackle. That evening I waded the flats near my house at low tide and managed to dip up about 20 small blue crabs.

The next day we arrived at the reef and you could see the permit on the surface from a great distance. The school was massive, holding hundreds of big fish.

We hurriedly rigged the crabs on 15-pound spinning rods, rigged braided line and short fluorocarbon leaders.

As soon as the crabs hit the water five or 10 permit would charge over to them but not bite.

Over and over the same thing happened: the fish were interested but something was wrong. Figuring the fish were seeing the opaque braided line, I rigged up a rod with a 12-foot leader of 25-pound test fluorocarbon.

That did the trick. The first cast with the new rig provided and instant surface strike and solid hookup. I quickly re-rigged the other rods and double headers became the norm.

Using this "wind-on" type leader on a spinning rod does come with some problems. Even if you trim the knots closely, as the bimini twist and no-name knot go through the guides on the way out, they occasionally snag and cut your cast short. By using a slow-arcing swing instead of a quick fling of the rod, you greatly reduce this problem.

Today our standard wreck permit rig consists of the long leader set up and a 1/0 or 2/0 hook baited with a silver dollar-sized crab. Since you are trying to mimic a free-swimming crab, no weight should be used. When the tide is slow we do sometimes use a small float to keep the crab from swimming to the bottom.

Live shrimp will work for bait on occasion but pale in comparison to crabs. Continued experimentation with soft plastic crabs has shown them to be a poor choice compared to the real thing but useful if they are all you have.

Finding which wrecks or reefs the permit are holding on during a given day can be tricky. After catching fish at the Rube Allyn for two days we returned again with a party of excited anglers only to find the fish were gone.

Such is the way of the permit. Here today, gone tomorrow. The fish are roamers and they often swim from one wreck to another for no apparent reason.

Some of the local wrecks that hold permit are the Pasco No. 1 artificial reef, the Misener Crane and the RJ Thompson.

[Last modified June 22, 2007, 20:15:40]