BlueWater Outriggers Fishing Report 1-12-2026
Good morning all you anglers and fishing enthusiasts. It’s a relatively quiet morning here in the back offices of the Bluewater Outriggers. Lisa is busy putting away about 100 boxes of our new Columbia fishing boots while Dave is manning the registers and letting me know each time a customer comes in that wants to buy some live shrimp. I’d say I’ve dished out about 15 dozen so far this morning. One thing I love about dishing out shrimp to our customers is that I can usually get them to talk fishing. Having grown up fishing my whole life, I’ve become pretty adept at reading between the lines when it comes to fish stories. There are some people that shoot perfectly straight with you. My Uncle David is one of those people. Then on the other hand there are some people that will just outright tell you a story so unbelievable Charles Dickens himself couldn’t come up with such a tale. I had one such customer just the other day that wove a web of lies about how he made three casts and caught three keepers down at the marina. If he had been hooked up to a polygraph machine the needle would have been jumping like the Richter scale measuring seismic waves during the Great Chilean earthquake of 1960. And lastly, there are those like our own beloved Jake Harpe. He’ll show me with his hands how big the fish was, and my brain will run some quick algorithms and shave a couple of inches off here and there and I’ll have a pretty good idea of what happened in reality. I say all that to say this: I haven’t got out there personally very much this week, but I have a pretty good idea of what’s been going on from talking to customers and viewing photos, etcetera.
Our red tide has continued to affect all the local fishing spots around town. I’ve heard no good news coming from the Tapper Bridge or Marina Wall as of yet. If you don’t mind making the short trip to the Cape, that seems to be where the action is. I managed to set a few “new to fishing” customers up with some rigs this last week and told them to head to the cape. They came in the following day with pictures of whiting and bonnethead sharks. This seems to be par for the course right now. A few others have also reported nice reds and a few pompano. There’s a little action going on Mexico Beach way, with several reported whiting catches, but the main action still remains on the cape. If you want the specks, you need to call up your buddy that has a boat and head upriver.
If you’ve read my past reports, you know that bonnetheads have been mentioned several times. There has been an influx of people coming in and buying shark bait like bonitos and stingray. If tugging on some big boys is your kind of thing, you should strike while the iron is hot. I spoke with Johnny Jones this last week, and he told me they were getting into some monsters. He and his friends Chris and Robin Clegg along with Alexander Star and Lucian Martinez Perez put in two good evenings of fishing and caught several species including Tiger, Sandbar and Bull sharks. Chris Clegg is a tried-and-true veteran of land-based shark fishing. He runs a Aquacat RC bait boat out around 400 yards and drops a whole bonito. The sharks that take the bait are some bad boys like the ones pictured above. Their 9 ½’ Tiger can be seen to the left, while their 7 ½’ Sandbar is pictured on the right. Johnny, Chris and the crew can be seen above center. On behalf of Bluewater Outriggers, we want to wish these valued customers a very big congratulations on the tremendous catch!
Folks, if you want to get out there and try your luck on some big boys, come talk to us at Bluewater Outriggers; We’ve got everything you need to introduce yourself to Mr. Smiley. From beefy rods and reels with high line capacity, to steel leaders, legal hooks and bloody bonito, we’ve got you covered. We hope to see you out there!
-Jeremiah Beasley