Salt Water Sportsman covers the world of saltwater fishing. The magazine offers loads of how-to information, advice for those who travel within the greater U.S. and surrounding waters, and reviews of new boats, tackle and electronics.
The first striped bass I ever caught was holding above a giant underwater pipe in the Chesapeake Bay delivering natural gas out to a docking station. My first-ever permit ate a crab that drifted into the boiling currents above a nuclear power plant outflow on Florida’s east coast. My biggest fluke ate a bucktail in 40 feet of water near the foot of an abutment of Brooklyn’s Marine Park Bridge. Fish love man-made structure. They’ll key in on even small rocks on otherwise featureless bottom. Sink a few subway cars and you’ll attract huge schools of game-fish. Jetties, piers and bridges concentrate bait and make the best fishing spots around. But there’s another type of structure they love even more: infrastructure. Specifically, sewer systems. I’ve seen firsthand how septic tanks…
For the average angler, keeping track of regulations covering fish size limits, possession limits and seasons is not an easy process. Add into the mix different regs for different states, and you begin to look at an alphabet soup of rules. How does this happen? The whole process of coordinated management started in the 1940s when fisheries managers realized that it made a lot more sense for states to collaborate on managing species that migrated along the coast. The idea was that coordinated management would be more effective and help maintain populations at sustainable levels. The Atlantic Coast was the first to craft an interstate compact that was ratified by the individual states and then approved by Congress in 1942 to form the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The Gulf…
When reef fish such as snapper and grouper are reeled up from deep water, they can suffer pressure-related injuries known as barotrauma. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission approved a rule at its February meeting aimed at increasing survival of reef fish by minimizing the effects of barotrauma. The new rule, now in place, requires that all vessels targeting reef fish in Florida state waters must have a descending device or venting tool rigged and ready for use on board. Secondly, anglers must use the tool on throwbacks experiencing barotrauma. The survival of released reef fish is a state and federal management priority in South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico waters.…
I come from a casting background, growing up a stone’s throw from the Potomac River. Summers were spent throwing Zara Spooks and Hula Poppers at largemouth bass, then freaking out every time one got smashed on top. That experience turned me into the jig-and-pop addict that I am today. When I got my first offshore-capable boat, I bought a small fortune in trolling gear: 30s and 50s, a couple of 80s, and some absurdly stiff rods with roller guides. There were spreader bars, daisy chains, Joe Shutes trolling lures, and all the other stuff too. But when I got out there, my results were tangle after tangle. During one of those tangles, I noticed we were marking tuna pretty well, so I dropped down a jig and got properly spooled.…
“Competition can lead to anglers losing their heads and making bad decisions.”—Jerry Audet Confrontations between shore and boat anglers can get ugly. Access to the best fishing spots is getting more and more crowded, and competition can lead to anglers losing their heads and making bad decisions. In these confrontations, neither party is innocent, and both are guilty of being rude or worse. It’s really easy for a boat angler to unintentionally (or intentionally) block or ruin a fishing spot for a shore-based angler. Typically, shore anglers are far more limited on the spots they can fish, and it takes a lot more time to move from one spot to the next. While it’s easy to suggest that the shore angler should “just buy their own boat,” some can’t afford…
If an angler fails to make the connection that the green jobfish (Aprion virescens) is a member of the snapper family (Lutjanidae) at first glance, it’s understandable. The green jobfish, the only species in its genus, is a lot longer and more streamlined than other snapper, and it just looks plain mean. Encountering jobbies is pretty easy, as long as you’re in the right neck of the woods. In a hyphenated word, that means the Indo-Pacific, a huge swath of ocean east as far as Hawaii (where jobfish are known as uku). Cast stickbaits or poppers around the edges of shallow reefs, and if any jobfish are around, you’ll see them chasing down and walloping your lure. That is to say they’re as aggressive as they look. You’ll definitely know…
