I had the time to head back out to the inlet friday evening, but this time I was not in search of snook and tarpon. I was looking for mangrove snappers. As I predicted in the last report, the snapper bite is slowly picking up. With a little bit of searching, I was awarded. When snapper fishing was slow at times, I switched to my snook rig as I just couldn’t resist and jumped (not landed) a small tarpon, but no snook this time unfortunately.

I caught about 10 grovers total (aka mangrove snapper). Almost all were around 9″ and were safely released, but I caught a keeper one just before leaving. Don’t forget that they have to be 10″ or bigger to keep and the bag limit is 5 per person. As for the bait situation, there were perfect sized sardines for snapper bait. Pilchards were there, but they where glued to the bottom and most of the time the small sardines would find the sabiki before anything else. Also, I did catch my biggest pilchard to date, an amazing creature, it had 7 black dots scattered throughout the body.

Here are some pics of the grovers caught. Sorry, no pics of the big pilchard and tarpon though.

All of the grovers were caught with small live sardines. If you put in time at the Boca Raton inlet, you WILL be awarded!

Tight lines everyone,

Rohit