A wind-shortened day out of Orange Beach turned into a non-stop bottom-bashing session for the FishAholic crew, who found red snapper, vermillion, trigger fish and a wide-open amberjack bite stacked over structure in the Gulf off Alabama — all on squid-profile jigs.
Running out of Perdido Pass aboard a 36-foot Cape Horn with Southern Bend charters, skipper Captain Buddy Paul set modest expectations given the conditions. "We're probably going to stay in a little close today and just see how it looks out there because of the wind and the wave height," Paul said. "We're going to go after some red snappers, catch at least some red snappers, and see if we can get our trigger fish and some vermillion snappers."
In roughly 80 feet of water, the bottom lit up the moment baits hit it. The crew leaned on Nomad Design Squid Trex 130 jigs — squid-scented straight out of the pack — and were immediately into fish. American red snapper came thick, alongside vermillion snapper, or "beeliners," that comfortably cleared the 10-inch minimum, and triggerfish that had to be measured carefully against the 15-inch-to-the-fork keeper limit.
It was the amberjack, though, that stole the day. Big AJs that normally hold deep were chasing baits to the surface in the relatively shallow water, an unusual sight that left the anglers scrambling. "I'm so used to catching AJs in three or four hundred feet of water," one of the crew said. "It's hard to stop them in this shallow water." At one point the boat was hooked up on all sides at once, with several amberjack visibly tracking down jigs and "smoking it on the drop."
The fishing was good enough that the crew's main competition came not from other boats but from a persistent bottlenose dolphin shadowing the vessel, picking off hooked fish before they could be landed or released. "I've got to get him up before the dolphin grabs him," became a recurring line as anglers worked to outsmart the predator, tossing released fish to the opposite side of the boat.
Captain Paul, who knows the local wrecks and barges intimately, has been guiding these waters for years. "I started doing it for a living in 2017," he said, "but I've been out here fishing since I was in my early teens." That local knowledge showed in a screen the crew described as simply "nuts" with the density of marks.
There was a regulatory bright spot, too. With the federal red snapper season still open and a generous quota, Paul indicated the fishery was unlikely to shut early. "It probably won't close until the seventh," he noted of the anticipated September date, adding that the zone hadn't closed early "in a while" — a contrast to the tighter, more contested seasons that have made headlines elsewhere along the US coast this year.
By early afternoon, with the dolphin growing bolder and the bite still firing, the crew called it on a high. The takeaways were straightforward: a squid-imitating jig fished on or just off the bottom, a willingness to fish "in a little close" when the forecast turns sour, and a captain who knows exactly where the fish stack up. For a "change of pace" trip squeezed in around the weather, it delivered a textbook Gulf mixed bag — and an amberjack show few of the anglers had seen play out on top before.
