07/22/2026
I never thought I'd see the day that the top 10 red snapper in the were bigger than the king mackerel. Either kings no longer like like it here in the summer or the Gulf stock has collapsed. We still catch a few offshore in the winter while tuna/wahoo fishing and along the beaches in summer, but June thru September kings (particularly bigger ones) are basically gone. Kings have always had cycles of good/bad years here. In “bad years” we’d catch 10 or so per trip instead of 50, but they’ve been in a real funk for years now, with only 1 or 2 on a "good" trip this year. Kings started disappearing just E/W of the Miss River passes 20 years ago, in the MP and ST blocks 10 years ago, and S of Dauphin Is and Fourchon about 5 years ago. This seems to be related to summer hypoxic zones S of Mobile Bay and off the Miss River getting exponentially larger in recent years and our costal/offshore water temperatures getting into the 90s from June thru September (used to never see this except maybe a few weeks in August), so I'm thinking they don’t like it here anymore and haven't been able spawn here in recent years. Many of their primary forage species like menhaden, herring, hardtails, etc are also greatly diminished here. Red tides along the west coast of Florida hit during the spring king migration for several years and likely killed some, but neither commercial or recreational quotas have been reached in many years so fishing shouldn't have impacted the situation much. The NMFS is asking everyone to comment on your king observations in the Gulf so go on line or to the next GC meeting and do so. The NMFS most recent stock assessment (2020) showed the stocks healthy in the Gulf, so this situations "official" timing corresponds to the hypoxic zone expansion and increased water temps. NMFS has started a stock assessment update, but I'm not sure if there's anything new regs can do about this.
