Yellowtail Snapper: How to Fish a Chum Slick

Yellowtail snapper are worth learning properly. They are outstanding eating, they are available on reef along both Florida coasts and through the Keys, and they can be caught in numbers — but only if you fish them the way they demand.

They are also the most line-shy fish most people will ever target. A rig that catches mangrove snapper all day will get inspected and refused by yellowtail without hesitation.

The whole idea in one sentence

Make your bait drift back through the slick at exactly the same speed as the chum, so it looks like food rather than something attached to a line.

Everything else follows from that.

Set the slick

Anchor up-current of the reef so the current carries your chum back over it. Get a chum bag in the water and let it work — you want a continuous stream, not occasional handfuls.

Give it time. A slick needs twenty or thirty minutes to pull fish up off the bottom and get them competing. People give up far too early.

When it is working you will see yellowtail materialise behind the boat, sometimes right at the surface.

Go absurdly light

This is where most people fail. The instinct is to use enough weight to control the bait. That is exactly wrong.

Use a 1/16, 3/32 or 1/8oz jig — barely enough lead to sink. The jig should drift back at chum speed, sinking slowly through the slick rather than dropping out of it.

• 1/16oz — slack tide, minimal current, spookiest fish.
• 3/32oz — the in-between weight most experienced yellowtail fishermen use most.
• 1/8oz — when current is running and lighter heads wash out.

If your jig is dropping straight down out of the slick, it is too heavy.

Leader is the other half

Fish the lightest fluorocarbon you can stand — often 15 or 20lb, sometimes lighter. Long leaders, and no visible hardware anywhere near the bait. Skip the swivel if you can.

When the bite dies, drop leader size before you change anything else. It works more often than any other adjustment.

Colour

White and natural on clear calm days, when the fish can see everything. Chartreuse when the water greens up or the light drops. Pink is the shrimp colour and a long-standing producer.

Change colour when a worked-over slick goes quiet — yellowtail get educated within an hour and something they have not already refused will often restart it.

Technique

Free-spool the jig back with the current, feeding line so it drifts naturally. Do not let the line come tight and drag the bait off its natural path — that is the moment a yellowtail refuses it.

The bite is soft. Often the line just stops drifting or goes slack. Come tight steadily rather than swinging.

Tipping

A small strip of bait on the jig is close to cheating. Yellowtail will commit to a tipped jig they refused clean.

The short version

Anchor up-current, chum continuously and patiently, fish the lightest jig that stays in the slick, use light fluorocarbon, and drift the bait back naturally. When it stops, go lighter and change colour.

Browse snapper tackle.