I went down to the Keys with Bill and Cameron to target Permit. We put the boat in the water Wednesday, bought 3 dozen crab and Bill netted a bunch of pinfish and ballyhoo for the livewell. After the bait stop we went to 130 feet and within seconds of putting the crabs in the water we were all hooked up on big permit. We caught permit on every crab. Most of the permit weighed between 20-35 lbs with two being over 40 lbs. When we used up the crabs we headed out to 700 feet to try to jig some snowy grouper off the bottom and get blackfin tuna on the way up. We did not get any snowy grouper but we did get a bunch of big Almaco jacks right at the bottom. Most of the jacks weighed between 40-60 lbs. After we completely exhausted ourselves reeling jacks up 700 feet with conventional reels, not electric, we went back into the reef to catch some snapper before dark. We got our limit on snapper, most being yellowtail with about 7 mangroves and 5 muttons mixed in. On day 2 we only had a half day to fish so we decided to go back out for jacks at the ledge since we did not want to spend $2 per crab on another 40 crabs to catch permit (the bait in the keys is way over priced!!!). We caught jacks and tuna for about 2 hours straight before we came in to fill the cooler with snapper. We kept the snapper and some tuna all the other fish except one small jack for the smoker were released. We got no sleep for 2 days but it was worth every minute.



































Bill was relieved to catch this little guy because we were wearing out from reeling big jacks up 700 feet




When we were too tired to reel up any more jacks we focused on catching tuna by only dropping our jigs about 300 feet and working them up from there.










a few of these little AJs came up and gave us a good fight on our snapper rigs.





The last double header to complete our limit right before the sun went down


Day 2 we only got a few pics before the camera battery died