Catching juvenile goliath grouper in the mangroves means targeting the smaller, twenty- to sixty-pound fish that live tucked under mangrove bushes along redfish, snook, and baby-tarpon shorelines, using a bait big enough to beat the snappers and a precise cast that lands well under the branches. This How 2 Tuesday came straight from an audience question — how do you target juvenile goliath groupers — and it landed right when I had just filmed a whole Saltwater Experience episode doing exactly that, so the tackle, the spots, and the technique were all fresh in my mind.
Listen now: Megaphone · Spotify · YouTube · or press play on the video above.
A juvenile goliath grouper is simply a young, smaller version of a fish that grows to six hundred pounds or more. In my experience they hold in certain shallow places when they are young, and at somewhere around fifty or sixty pounds they start to move out to other areas where they have more food and grow larger. The smaller ones, in the twenty-pound class, are the ones that stack up along mangrove shorelines.
Look on mangrove shoreline areas — the same spots where you would fish for baby tarpon, snook, and redfish have enough water depth, habitat, and food to hold a goliath grouper too. To find a real congregation, work a deeper stretch of shoreline that has a little hook or point in it, because all the current flows into that spot like a wall and stacks the fish up. The surest way is to put on a mask and fins and snorkel the shoreline, where it becomes very obvious where they are.
Pinfish and mullet are my two go-to baits, because they are big enough that the small snappers cannot chew them up the way they destroy a live shrimp. You can adjust your pinfish trap funnel to catch exactly the size you want — one that is too big for a snapper. A crab is another excellent option, especially when the snappers are eating you alive, and store-bought crabs give you a reasonable chance when you cannot get pinfish or mullet.
My favorite is a seven-foot St. Croix Triumph rod in medium-heavy action, which is a ten- to twenty-pound class rod. I run twenty-pound Daiwa J-Braid on a 4000-size Daiwa Saltist reel, with a fifty-pound fluorocarbon leader and a three-eighths-ounce jig head. That lighter setup matters because it lets you make the precise cast up under the bushes, which a heavy tarpon rod makes almost impossible.
I keep the drag light and palm the reel rather than locking it down. My philosophy on mean fish is that the harder you fight against them, the harder they pull against you, so if one heads back into the bushes I let it go. The mangroves usually do not reach all the way to the bottom — there is a ledge under there with little to snag on — so you can let the fish settle and then work it back out.
No. It is illegal to take these fish out of the water, and there is no reason to anyway. Lip them with a glove, because they have a lot of teeth, slip the hook out, and let them go. Minimize the handling, keep them in the water, and you will protect the fish and stay clear of any trouble from the agencies that manage them.
Yes, and that is a big part of why they are so fun. A lot of anglers from the Midwest and the South whose biggest largemouth ever is ten pounds can go out and catch a twenty-pound goliath grouper on very similar tackle — and it fights much harder than a largemouth bass.
This one came in from the audience, and the timing could not have been better. Our debut Saltwater Experience show for the new season was catching goliath groupers under the mangroves, so I had just spent days dialing in the exact rods, baits, and casts that worked. I wanted to give the short, practical version here and point you to the full episode for the visuals. Press play in the player above to hear it in my own words.
I did not learn these spots by hunting goliath grouper. I learned them fishing for small tarpon, redfish, and snook, and seeing the groupers sitting right there under the bushes. Over time I started paying attention to which shorelines held a real congregation instead of just one or two, and it came down to current, depth, and life. Listen to that section for how I read a shoreline before I ever make a cast.
The instinct is to reach for a live shrimp, and it is the one thing that guarantees you never hook a goliath. The small snappers get to a shrimp instantly, the same way they keep you from ever catching a giant snapper on shrimp. The fix is a bait big enough that the snappers leave it alone, and I explain exactly how I size my pinfish for that in the episode.
The whole game is a precise cast up under the branches, and I learned that the hard way by starting with a rod that was too heavy. Going down to that seven-foot Triumph and pinning the bait to the bottom with a jig head was the single biggest key — when we were not far enough under the bushes, we got no bites at all. Hear me walk through the full setup in the player above.
Most people expect you to lock the drag and horse a goliath out before it reaches cover. I do close to the opposite. I keep the drag light, palm the reel, and even take my hand off it when a fish wraps something, because that ledge under the mangroves gives me room to work it back out. Listen to how I describe playing these fish, and why my buddy Rich does it the heavy-handed way and still catches them.
This is one of those overlooked fisheries that is right in front of a lot of us. A twenty-pound fish that eats a bass-sized bait, pulls harder than a largemouth, and lives on the same shorelines you already fish is about as good as it gets for a fun day.
Get the spot, the bait, and the cast right, keep the fish in the water, and you are set. Press play above, or grab this episode on Megaphone or Spotify.
Goliath grouper · mangrove shorelines · pinfish · mullet · St. Croix Triumph rod · Daiwa J-Braid · Daiwa Saltist reel · Saltwater Experience · Waypoint TV · Sportsman's Channel · Discovery
I'm Tom Rowland, a professional fishing guide based in the Florida Keys, host of the Tom Rowland Podcast, and the longtime host of the Saltwater Experience television show. How 2 Tuesday is my short midweek series where I answer a listener question with the specific tackle, spots, and techniques I use on the water, so you can go put it to work on your next trip.
Tom Rowland Podcast — Episode 377: How To Catch Juvenile Goliath Grouper In The Mangroves
In this episode: why a 20-pound goliath fights harder than a largemouth, reading the shoreline hook where current stacks them up, pinfish and mullet over live shrimp, the exact St. Croix Triumph jig-head rig, and why you never take these fish out of the water — in the exact words spoken.
Tom Rowland: What's going on, everybody? It's how to Tuesday. Glad to be here. Hope you guys are all doing well. Today, we're taking a question from the audience, and that question was, how do you target juvenile goliath groupers?
Tom Rowland: So first of all, I don't know why we call little Goliath groupers juveniles when we call baby tarpon baby tarpon. So call them what you want, juvenile Goliath groupers, baby Goliath groupers, small Goliath groupers, whatever you wanna call them. The goliath grouper gets to be six hundred pounds or more. But somewhere along the line, they're not they're not born that big, so they grow from a smaller size up to a really big size. And it's been my experience that they are in certain places when they're young, and then at a certain size, maybe about sixty pounds, fifty, sixty pounds, maybe maybe more, they start to make their way out to other areas where they tend to grow larger. They have more food at their disposal, but there are some places where these smaller goliath groupers do like to hang out. I have been able to figure out some of those places mostly because of where I was fishing for the small tarpon. And I would actually see goliath groupers under the bushes. Same thing for redfish and snook spots. Sometimes you can see a goliath grouper under the bush, and those are good spots. But as I started to find out that many people from especially from the Midwest or the South that love to bass fish, thought these fish were fantastic because maybe the biggest bass they've ever caught in their entire life is 10 pounds. You could go out and you could catch a 20 pound Goliath Grouper on very similar tackle, and they fight probably much harder than a largemouth bass. And they are a spectacular fish, if you ask me. Well, if we can catch them occasionally, how can we start to target them a little more frequently?
Tom Rowland: So some of the things that we wanna talk about first are where those fish would be. Those are good spots, mangrove shoreline type areas. Anywhere that there's a red fish, a snook, or baby tarpon, there is likely to be enough water depth, enough habitat, enough food to support a goliath grouper as well.
Tom Rowland: What I'm looking for is going down a shoreline where the current, typically, you're gonna have an incoming tide going one way and outgoing tide's gonna go the other. So these spots may work really well on an incoming tide, but may not work as well on an outgoing tide. And that shoreline has a little hook in it where it kinda goes down straight, and then it kinda juts out a little bit in front of you and then keeps going. Well, all that current is flowing directly into that little area. It's like a wall, and it's been my experience that that is where you can find them really congregated. In fact, they may move out of there and move over to another spot where the tide is flowing right into their face.
Tom Rowland: If you really wanna know how to find them, put on a mask and fins, get in there, and snorkel around on these mangrove shorelines. It will become very, very obvious where they are. But if you don't wanna do that, you can just kind of prospect down the shoreline.
Tom Rowland: I'm looking for activity, life. I wanna see snappers. I wanna see pilchards. There needs to be lots of life. It'd be great if there were redfish and snook there. There is life. There's activity. There's food. There's clean water. There's water flow. All of that is the recipe for finding these fish and the other ones as well.
Tom Rowland: So if you decide that you're gonna go after these fish with live shrimp, for example, you're never gonna catch one because the smaller snappers are gonna get to it. It's the same reason why you never catch a really giant snapper on a live shrimp because the little ones get in there, and they love to eat that live shrimp. So you have to come up with a bait that is big enough that the snappers won't mess with it. So those baits are mullet, pinfish, and pilchards to an extent if they're really big.
Tom Rowland: So, really, for me, it is pinfish and mullet, and you can adjust your pinfish trap to catch exactly the size pinfish that you want. Basically, that size pinfish is gonna fit through your funnel. And the just the right one is the one that's too big for a snapper, unless it's a really mongo snapper. And the mullet are excellent baits for that reason.
Tom Rowland: Now once you find the place that you're going to fish, and you've got the bait, either the pinfish or the mullet, now you're ready to actually fish for them. You can get the boat pretty close to the mangroves, for these fish. They're not really that spooky because, generally, they are under the bushes. And you're going to need to get the boat in fairly close because you're going to have to have a very precise cast. You're going to have to be casting under the bushes with a live bait, which is pretty tough. So if you cast it six feet from the bushes, you're probably not gonna catch any. If you cast it two feet under the bushes, now you're talking. If you can get it six feet under there, awesome.
Tom Rowland: Goliath grouper, like any other fish, action brings more action. You may wanna start catching a bunch of snappers. The snappers are throwing up stuff when they get caught. That starts to bring everything out from the bushes. Once that starts to happen, the Goliath will move out. You get your bigger bait in the area, and you're likely to get bit.
Tom Rowland: Now, I like to get my bait pinned to the bottom. So if I'm using a small pinfish, I can do that with just a quarter ounce jig head or maybe a three eighths ounce jig head. I'll hook that right through the lip, and I'll throw the pinfish out to where it's gonna take a nosedive to the bottom. What I know about that pinfish is it's not gonna go start swimming around all the roots. The same thing's true with a mullet, even more so with a mullet. If you get a good cast in there with a weightless mullet, now it's gonna start swimming around, and it can get you all tied up around the roots, and that's no good. So a jig head is my favorite. I like the weight to be right down on the hook, either a jig head or a hook with weight right over the top of it. I don't like to use, like, a knocker rig or a Carolina rig or anything like that where the weight is up the line. Because as you cast to the bushes, the thing starts to helicopter, and you're very likely to get it caught in the bushes. So I don't want anything above my hook. I want the weight right down on the hook like a jig head or a weight right there, and then I'm gonna get precise casting into the bushes.
Tom Rowland: So a lot of people, as they start to find the Goliaths, they're fishing with tackle that's too heavy. And a big tarpon rod is a good idea for a 60 pound fish underneath the bushes. But most people are having trouble casting that accurately enough to get it under the bush. That's why I'll go with, like, a 10 to 20 pound rod, my favorite one. In fact, the interesting thing is that our debut show for 2021 is catching goliath groupers under the mangroves. And so it's fresh in my mind exactly the tackle that we used, exactly the way that we did it.
Tom Rowland: So what I was using in this last show, I started using a heavier rod. This rod was seven feet 11 inches long, almost eight feet long. And it was a perfect rod for fishing tarpon at the bridge. It was a Saint Croix rod. I found that I was not able to get my bait where I wanted it to. So I went down in tackle size to a seven foot Triumph rod by Saint Croix. It's the medium heavy action, so that's a 10 to 20 pound class rod. It had 20 pound Daiwa j braid on it, and I used a 4,000 size Daiwa Saltist reel. I put a 50 pound fluorocarbon leader on it and the jig head that we're talking about, a three eighths ounce jig head. On this day, we were using pinfish because we couldn't get any mullet. And that turned out to be a great rig because I was able to get it under the bushes, and that was a real big key to catching any of these fish. If we weren't close enough to the bushes or far enough under the bushes, we were not getting any bites.
Tom Rowland: Goliath groupers will probably eat just about anything, but these small goliath groupers love to eat crabs. They often cough up a lot of crabs. They cough up lobsters, small lobsters, all the time. They love to eat that stuff. So one good bait for a goliath grouper is a crab, especially if you're getting eaten alive by the snappers, and that's not what you're after. But if you're really looking for the goliath grouper, consider a crab. A crab works really well. I've used crabs for redfish under the bushes. You're fishing for redfish, and all of a sudden, you get a good thump. It turns out to be a goliath grouper. They eat crabs really well. If you can't get the pinfish or the mullet, you could go with store bought crabs and have a reasonable chance of catching those.
Tom Rowland: I like to fish with a circle hook if I can. But if I'm using this jig head like we're talking about, I'm gonna have my rod tip up, and I'm gonna be kind of feeling that bait. A goliath grouper has a thump, like a serious thump, maybe one, two thump kind of bite. And you get to set the hook like a bass fisherman, and then you get to really fight them under the bushes. I tend to kind of play them easy because my philosophy on really mean fish, like goliath groupers, Jack Crevalles, giant trevally, even tarpon and permit, is the more you fight against them, the more they pull against you. So if they are kind of heading back into the bushes, I don't think it's a life or death kinda thing. You can get them out because the mangroves oftentimes don't go all the way down to the bottom. They hang over and look like they do, but there is a ledge under there, and there's really not a lot of stuff to get caught on. You don't break your line. You don't straighten out the hook, and you kinda let them go back under the bushes and then start to work them back out. Now don't get me wrong. You gotta put plenty of pressure on them, but I don't think it's necessary to just absolutely lock the drag down. So that's why I tend to fish with a little bit lighter tackle. I tend to keep the drag light and palm the drag. I don't really use the reel drag as much as some anglers might. I use my hand a little bit more, and I like that better because if I feel like they go around something, I can just take my hand completely off the reel, and they can pull that line pretty easily around any of the branches, dead wood, anything that's down there. A lot of people like Rich, he's very heavy handed on these fish. He does not like to let them get up under the bushes, and he catches them just fine. It's a different style, different technique. Both work. So we've gone over the tackle. We've gone over where to find them. We've gone over the baits.
Tom Rowland: And it's important also to know that it is illegal to take these fish out of the water. There's no reason to take these fish out of the water. You just lip them with a glove. They have a lot of teeth, and just slip the hook out and let them go. Leave them in the water and let them go. They're very hardy fish. So minimize the handling, minimize pulling them out of the water or eliminate that completely. And you're not gonna get any trouble from fish and wildlife, or anybody, any agency that is protecting them. And you're also gonna protect the fish.
Tom Rowland: So that's the Goliath Grouper one zero one. If it does, share this with one of your friends. Send me an email at podcast@saltwaterexperience.com. If you got further questions, we can do a part two on this if you would like. Saltwater Experience, it's gone Waypoint first, and it's gonna be on Sportsman's Channel and then Discovery. That's how to Tuesday for today. We'll see you next week.
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