Thread: Rigs south of Ft Morgan

Does anyone know of any rigs south of Ft Morgan further than the ones that can be seen from the beach? I often hook up and fish the ones approx six miles out but would like to know if there are any further out?

A few... ;-)

https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/v...?useExisting=1



The spots in red are existing rigs.

Thanks #r. It looks like a sign-in may be required on that site in order to view the specific map that you attached. Specifically, I would like to find a rig within 15 miles (but further than the 6 miles that I am used to) to try. As I have mentioned in previous posts, my becoming comfortable with structure fishing would eliminate the importance for hunting rigs to hook up to!

The black squares on this map (11360) were rigs a few years ago, but I don't know which if any have been removed. That cluster SE of the farewell buoy is about 10 NM from the Fort and some are still there.

The one closest to the buoy is at approx. 30 deg 04.718' by 88 deg 00.690'

The one that says "RACON" is at approx. 30 deg 05.622 by 87 deg 52.962'.

By the way, if you are going to be boating about in the GoM, Offshore Navigator Lite is well worth the money. For less than $100 you get every NOAA chart, from Alaska to Maine.

Here's a tighter zoom that will let you pick numbers off a little better.

That nesting of rigs is in the vicinity of what we used to call "Southeast Banks".

Try this chart for a bit more detail (zoomable with mouse rollbar), plus depths are in feet instead of fathoms...
http://www.charts.noaa.gov/OnLineViewer/11376.shtml


From there you can see more rigs (on the horizon) off to the south and southwest...

Plus there are dozens of ALMR reefs (bridge rubble, reef modules and tanks) deployed in that vicinity (Don Kelly Reef Area) and to the westsouthwest (Hugh Swingle Reef area)...
http://www.outdooralabama.com/sites/...f_Brochure.pdf

Most of the "reachable" rigs (less than 25 miles from the western tip of Fort Morgan) are now gone (all the blue dots on the map below).
This is a real shame, we fished those rigs back in the mid 90's-2003. Caught a lot of fish around them.
There are still more rigs farther out, in the 30-50 mile range, but you gotta have a little more boat to reach those.

Structure fishing is not hard, just takes a little practice and patience. Use the two-buoy system to anchor, have lots of rode & a good bit of heavy chain. And an anchor retrieval ball. Don't be afraid to re-set the anchor multiple times until you get it right.
Start by fishing the larger reefs, ships, barges, tensaw bridge spans, etc...
We rarely ever tried to anchor over the tanks or pyramids, easier to idle in place.