Report for Destin, Florida - Nearshore

Capt. Larry Pentel
August 15, 2001
Destin - Saltwater Fishing Report

The fishing has ben great since since T.S Barry came through last week and stirred things up. The weather took a long time to calm down tho with lots of squalls coming every couple hours untill yesterday. Today was one of those days you wished you could save to play over and over again. Light North breeze this AM with the the wind going still for a couple hours at mid-day. The gulf was so slick it looked like liquid metal. I was glad to be hot after a week of dodging rain showers.

As I said the fishing has been excellent. It seems this weather moved a lot of Red Snappers and triggers around and left a lot of 'em up near the beach for easy fishin'. I've had a limit of snapper every trip this week, even the 4 hour ones. The trip today was classic. Just 2 folks, dad and about a 14 year old boy. I figured it would be an easy 5 hour trip for me with only a couple of folks to keep up with. I ended up having to move as fast as I could the whole time. We started out snapper fishing and had 9 good ones in the boat within the first hour. With our limit being 12 I told 'em we should save the last 3 slots for big ones and start throwing back anything less tahn 5 or 6#. Dad Kept snapper fishin' and I set the son up with a grouper rod. He missed a couple but figured it out and caught the next 2 that bit.He couldn't believe anything could pull that hard and wanted a break after the second one. Meanwhile Dad is steady catching and I'm releasing 2 to 3# snappers. They wanted to try someting else so we moved over to a wreck to start trying for triggers. They figured out how to do that pretty quick and soon had a good mess of trigs. I switched 'em back over to slip leads and we finished out our snapper limit with 3 at 6 to 10 lbs. Okay, we've still got 2 hours left, lets go king Mackeral fishing. I ran over to a big rock that usually holds kings and started putting baits out. I never got more than 2 rods out! The kings were HOT. We had our 6 fish limit in the box in less than an hour along with a big spanish. They wanted to keep catching kings and release 'em so we did that for rest of the trip. We even had to release 2 FINE snappers that ate our trolled live baits on the surface! I cleaned fish for 2 hours and I'm beat. But it sure is that GOOD tired!

The tarpon finally turned back on yesterday. I was supposed to Tarpon fish all last week but cancelled my trips after "Barry". Good thing too. Untill yesterday I only know of one tarpon being hooked by anyone. A big storm has that effect on 'em unfortunately. As I said tho the show is back on. Hop-efully we're done with our share of tropical weather for the year and the "silver rockets" will just get hotter and hotter over the next 6 weeks.

Remember that sunscreen and LETS GO FISHIN"

capt. Larry Pentel

More Fishing Reports:

• All Reports by Capt. Larry Pentel
• Destin Fishing Reports
• Panhandle and Big Bend (Suwannee to Pensacola) Reports
• Florida Fishing Reports
• Browse All Fishing Reports