Red snapper rise to chum and make catching a breeze in South Timbalier 100 field.
Snapper fishing in the Gulf of Mexico has been as good or better than many anglers can ever remember in the week that it’s been open. Crews are landing 10-man limits of snapper in as little as 25 minutes.
Capt. Joey Palmisano and his son Billy Joe with Cocodrie Fishing Charters have been getting it done like this every day since the opening of snapper season, and he believes the bite will stay this good the entire season.
“Snapper season opened on June 1s, and it’s really just been incredible,” Palmisano told me as we idled away from Trade Winds Marina in Cocodrie earlier this week. “We’ve been fishing every day, and we’re fishing the snapper on the top.
“There’s no dropping weights down or any of that. It’s just been a neat experience to see it like that.”
Palmisano, who has been fishing snapper out of coastal Louisiana for probably 25 years, didn’t get to do much snapper fishing last year because of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. But that layoff didn’t cloud his memory enough for him to realize what’s going on this year.
“This has been the biggest snapper and easiest-to-catch snapper that I’ve ever been involved in,” Palmisano said as we ran through Terrebonne Bay. “I think the lack of fishing pressure last year only helped the bite this year.
“We’re catching a lot of 8- to 15-pound snapper with the occasional 20-pounder in there, and we caught a 25-pounder yesterday.”
Our plan for this day was to pull up to the platform we were going to fish in the South Timbalier 100 field and throw some chum out to get the snapper up to the surface. Then it would only be a matter of getting a bait in front of the schooling snapper.
Palmisano said they would be throwing out some fish from what they had cleaned the day before for chum, and that our actual baits would be sardines.
It didn’t take any time to get the snapper up to the surface once we got to the platform. The green water turned red because of all the snapper swarming around the boat, and you could almost pick out the snapper you wanted to catch. The frenzy of chum, feeding and fighting fish only made the action that much more intense.
I stood in the back of the boat to snap a few pictures, and it was like an assembly line of anglers fighting their fish toward the back of the boat. Cast, hook, fight, walk, net, unhook: That was the order of events for the next 25 minutes as we wrapped up a nine-man limit of 18 snapper in under 30 minutes.
As we made our way back toward the coast after wrapping up our limit, Palmisano explained that these snapper were suspended about 30 feet deep when we pulled up but that they had come straight to the top after the chum started going out.
The platform we were fishing was in 58 feet of water, but we caught our snapper only a foot below the surface.
“These snapper stay on these rigs all the time,” Palmisano concluded as the hands back at Trade Winds helped moor his boat. “As long as there is feed there and they don’t move, we’ll be able to catch them like this all the way to the end of the season.
“I don’t see any difference between now and July 19.”
Contact Cocodrie Fishing Charters at 985.991.3152.
