Fishing For Grouper in Key West

Two anglers show off their catch of black grouper. Although far from huge, fish of this size put up an amazing scrap and many more are hooked and lost than are landed.

The grouper is one of the angler's favorite but most frustrating fish. They're not hard to hook BUT they're absolute murder to get to the boat. The problem is that the grouper lives around rocks, reefs, wrecks in fact anywhere where he can hide or bolt to and once hooked he's in a hole before you can react. 

Their mouth and gills form a powerful sucking system that sucks their prey in from a distance and their gill muscles are so powerful, that it is nearly impossible to pull them out of their cave if they feel attacked and extend them in order to lock themselves in. With fish weighing up to 600 lbs, they really are a great adversary for the light tackle angler.

A Goliath Grouper caught from a wreck in the Gulf of Mexico. It really is a battle of strength to get these guys up to the surface. The species is protected and they are all returned to swim back to their hiding places and because they are all returned there now seems to be a population explosion with at least one Goliath on every wreck !.

Grouper are found on all of the wrecks in the Gulf and they live around the rock piles and the reef on the Atlantic side of Key West, in fact there are even a few in the harbor itself. Grouper come in a huge variety of species with the black, red, gag and goliath grouper all being found in considerable numbers around Key West.

Several of the grouper family are threatened by overfishing, compounded by the tendency of the fish to form into huge groups when spawning, making them an easy target for the commercial fishermen. The largest of the grouper family, the goliath grouper (formerly called the jewfish) is protected and must be returned alive to the ocean but they're a very hardy fish and will swim away none the worse for wear if you manage to hook and land one.

This video clip shows the capture of one "proper" Goliath and one baby Goliath. The fish were caught on the light tackle boat "Coolwater" whilst fishing over a shallow wreck in the Gulf of Mexico.

Black Grouper of this size are quite common. This one was caught on the reef whilst fishing for yellowtails. He'd already eaten a couple of snapper off the hook before we sent down a bait on suitably heavy tackle and then it was just a case of PULL...HARDER !!

Incidentally, grouper are part of a chain reaction that illustrates how the actions of mankind can affect something that seems totally removed from whatever they are meddling with. It has been reported that the killing of sharks (for shark fin soup) is leading to an increase in the number of groupers and thus a decline in the numbers of parrot fish and thus more algae overgrowing the coral reefs.