Fishing with Captain Maurice Fitzsimmons
Catching Big Snapper
Editor’s
Note: On the last weekend of snapper season, I went
fishing at Orange Beach, Alabama, with Captain Maurice
Fitzsimmons on his 100-foot long charter boat, the “Miss
Celeste” - the biggest and fastest charter boat
in Orange Beach. The seas were rough, and only two boats
were able to get out in the water at 7:00 a.m. However,
because of the size and the speed of Captain Fitz’s
boat, we were able to take 18 people out for a day of
snapper fishing, limit out on red snapper and return
to the dock by 4:00 p.m. We also watched any college
football game we wanted on the boat’s wide-screen
television with satellite hookups, while sitting in
comfortable, overstuffed couches and eating all of our
favorite foods. Life doesn’t get any better than
this. Captain Fitz was also the creative mind who came
up with the Red Snapper World Championship (RSWC), which
has been responsible for one of the largest public artificial-reef-building
programs in the nation, and has one of the strongest
sportsmen’s lobbies in Washington. This week,
you’ll meet Captain Fitz, learn how and why the
RSWC began, and how to catch big snapper.
Question: Captain Fitz, I’ve noticed that when
you pull up on a reef, you tell your fishermen not to
drop their baits all the way to the bottom. Most people
fish the bottom for snapper and grouper. Why do you
tell your anglers not to let their baits all the way
down to the bottom?
Fitz: The people who fish the bottom for red snapper
are fishing for the smallest snapper in the school.
The bigger snapper are always holding higher up in the
water than the smaller snapper. If you let your baits
go all the way to the bottom, you’ll usually only
catch small snapper. Because I want my anglers to catch
big snapper, we don’t drop our baits all the way
to the bottom. Another advantage to fishing this way
is when a big snapper takes one of my fishermen’s
bait, and the fish is away from the reef, the angler
has a better chance of getting that snapper up and in
the boat, than an angler who’s fishing on the
bottom. When you fish on the bottom, a big snapper may
get into the reef and break the line. Now, if you’re
going to fish for grouper, you can use a really-big
bait, drop it all the way to the bottom and get a big
grouper bite. The area we fished today was a snapper
region. I could see on my depth finder that the bigger
snapper were holding 30 feet off the bottom, so that’s
where we fished, and that’s where we caught the
bigger snapper.
Question: What’s the biggest red snapper you’ve
ever caught on your boat during the Red Snapper World
Championship (RSWC)?
Fitz: We caught a 28-pound snapper the first year, a
25-pound snapper the second year and a 24-pound snapper
last year. In a season of fishing, we’ll catch
a lot of 25-pound red snapper.
Question: Why do you think those older, big red snapper
are caught here at Orange Beach?
Fitz: There’s just plenty of big snapper in the
area we fish. We’ve built thousands of reefs for
more than 50 years. We also know how to protect our
young fish and let our red snapper reach quality size,
which is about 10- to 12-pounds each.
Question: Do most of the captains manage their red
snapper like you do?
Fitz: Yes, a lot of them do. I don’t know how
all the captains fish, but I know that the captains
who’ve been fishing this area the longest, know
how to manage red snapper and prevent over-harvesting
of red snapper. When my party starts catching little
fish, I move to a different spot. I want to protect
those younger snapper until they reach harvestable size.
If we catch small fish off a reef, I won’t take
a party back to that spot for at least 6 months. Many
times, another group of snapper will move onto that
reef, and you may be expecting to catch barely-legal-size
snapper, and instead catch trophy snapper, especially
if there’s another reef close by and some of the
big snapper from that reef migrated over to your reef.
There are plenty of reasons that you catch bigger snapper
off a spot than you’ve expected to catch.
Question: Why does Orange Beach produce more big red
snapper consistently than any other port on the Gulf
Coast or in the nation for that matter?
Fitz: We have over 1,200 miles of permitted reef area,
which is a tremendous amount of bottom designated for
reef building. In that area, there’s no shrimping.
Therefore, many of the juvenile snapper that get killed
in other regions as part of the shrimper’s by-catch,
don’t get killed in this permitted area. We can
raise red snapper from a larvae to a 20- to a 30-pound
fish, without that fish having to leave this permit
area. Because we continue to build new reefs every year
as old reefs deteriorate and rust away, we have new
reefs constantly being deployed. So, there are always
plenty of habitats on which the fish can live, feed,
grow and be caught.
Question: What can you tell about the quality of snapper
that you’ve caught from Orange Beach over the
last 20 years?
Fitz: In the 1990s, there were very few snapper here.
If you saw 20 snapper come to the dock from one boat,
that would be considered a big catch. As we started
doing more reef building and having length and number
limits on our catch, there’s no doubt that it’s
helped our red snapper population
in this section of the Gulf of Mexico. Now, all the
captains are producing good quality snapper, and many
of the captains will come in with limits of snapper
every day. We’ve learned how to manage our snapper,
not over-fish our spots and build more reefs, so we
can have plenty of places to fish. I believe there’s
more red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, today, at least
in the Orange Beach region, than there’s ever
been. Alabama was historically a non-snapper state.
We’ve proven that if charter-boat fishermen, sport
fishermen and state and local governments work together
to improve habitat, they can create a fishery where
there hasn’t been one or where there’s been
limited fishing in the past.
To find the locations of Alabama’s public reefs,
visit www.outdooralabama.com/fishing/saltwater/where/artificial-reefs/.
To learn more about the Red Snapper World Championship,
go to http://redsnapper.orangebeachsnapper.com/.
To fish with Captain Fitz, you can reach him at (251)
626-9437. To learn more about the Orange Beach/Gulf
Shores area, check out www.orangebeach.com,
or call – 1-800-745-7263. For more information
on the Orange Beach Fishing Association, go to www.gulffishing.net/.
Tomorrow: Big Snapper Bai
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