The Margaritas is a commercial fishing vessel working out of Apalachicola, Florida. She is a 42 foot Garcia hull with a 671 Detroit Diesel engine, rigged for longlining. We participate in both the grouper and shark fisheries, as much as the government will still allow us to, that is. We used to fish exclusively with gear known as bottom longline gear, basically a large scale trot line, however, due to recent changes in regulations and restrictive closures, we have added four electric reels (known as "bandits") to our arsenal and are attempting to learn some new tricks.
The boat usually runs with a Captain and two crew, although that can vary. We try to get in two grouper trips a month when we are grouper fishing and during the limited and widely varying shark seasons fish as much as we can as long as the season is open. While grouper fishing, the government has imposed a limit of 6,000lb per trip as well as seasonal and regional closures. In addition, the last few years we've had a complete closure of the deepwater fishery (yellowedge and brown groupers) by mid June. While shark fishing we have a government imposed trip limit of 4,000 lbs per trip but at this point it looks like there won't be much in the way of openings in 2007 that the F/V Margaritas will be in a position to take advantage of.
Thanks for visiting this website. Check out some more of the links to the right. You can see photos of the boat, both at the dock and out fishing, as well as some pictures of our area. We also have a couple of albums of trips to area boatyards. You can also stream some "Margaritas" songs while checking out the rest of the site and all links from this page (except some Google ads) open new tabs or windows so that stream won't be chopped off when you click a link.
