Snook season is underway as Miami-Dade and Broward-area anglers jump at chance

The snook season opened this past Sunday, and while anglers in the Keys cast lures and live bait around mangrove-lined islands in the remote waters of Everglades National Park, snook fanatics in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties fish around boat docks, bridges and fishing piers.

Snook are concentrated in warmer, inshore waters at this time of year, although all local piers have some snook lurking. Given the lack of mangroves, snook in South Florida make do with boat docks, which provide protection from predators as well as sites from which to ambush smaller fish and crustaceans.

As with mangrove islands, some boat docks are better than others. Mark Nichols likes docks in shallow water that have easy access to deep water. The deeper water is warmer this time of year, and its proximity to shallow areas allow snook to move to a dock when they want to pick off an unsuspecting baitfish or shrimp.

“If you’ve got a dock with a big boat that sits there a lot, they like that, too,” Nichols said.

Nichols, the founder of D.O.A. Lures, said docks can be productive day or night, as long as the tide is moving. He prefers the last half of an outgoing tide and full light or full dark.

“I don’t start fishing until an hour after dark,” Nichols said. “If I’m fishing during the day, I want the sun to be up for a while so the fish go under the dock for shade.”

The best docks for night fishing have lights that create shadow lines on the water. Snook will stay on the dark side of the line and wait for the tide to bring shrimp and baitfish to them. Local anglers can often see snook in the water around lighted docks in the Intracoastal Waterway and adjacent canals at night.

To fish such a dock properly, Nichols casts his lure – usually a plastic shrimp – into the light and lets it drift with the tide into the shadow.

“If the dock has no lights, or you’re fishing during the day, then you work close to the structure,” Nichols said. “Skip your lure under the dock. It’s like skipping a rock. You release the rock low to the water, and you want to release the lure low to the water.”

Nichols tries to skip his lure as far under a dock as possible. Even if he has plenty of room to cast a shrimp under a dock, he prefers to skip it because that imitates a shrimp’s natural movement pattern. Plus it gets a snook’s attention. When the lure stops skipping, Nichols said it’s critical to let the bait fall right there.

“A lot of people make great casts, then reel in the lure before it has a chance to settle,” he said. “When you let the bait fall, the shrimp just glides down like a real shrimp does. I try to get the bait to the fish’s comfort zone, rather than try to make the fish chase the bait.”

If a snook doesn’t hit on the initial fall, Nichols retrieves the shrimp with a series of light twitches of his fishing rod. If he’s using one of his company’s baitfish imitations such as the TerrorEyz or Baitbuster, which usually produce fewer strikes but bigger snook, he retrieves the lure with slow sweeps of the rod after the bait sinks to the bottom.

Live shrimp with a split shot or two crimped above the hook can also be cast under docks.

The fun begins when a snook grabs the bait. The barnacle-encrusted pilings of docks can make short work of most fishing lines. Nichols uses 20-pound braided line, which resists breaking, with a 2-foot-long leader of 30- to 50-pound fluorocarbon, which is invisible in the water.

“The braided line definitely allows me to pull them out from around stuff,” Nichols said.

Anglers also can have success this time of year by working jigs and plugs along the shadow lines of lit bridges over Biscayne Bay and the Intracoastal Waterway.

Trolling baitfish-imitating lures such as a Bomber Long A or Rat-L-Trap along and through bridges also works.

Nichols said shore-bound anglers can catch snook from the base of bridges by casting out a Long A and letting the tide sweep it toward the bridge.

The season in Atlantic waters runs through the end of May. Anglers are allowed to keep one snook per day measuring 28-32 inches in length.

Snook are delicious, which is one reason the bag and size limits are so restrictive. The fish can be prepared several ways, but the overwhelming favorite method is to dredge chunks of snook in bread crumbs and fry them.