This past weekend when I was fooling around the marina waiting for my buddy to show, I decided to put on a tiny kastmaster and have some fun with the little snapper blues that were seemingly everywhere. I moved around a little, and in one particular spot I would get follows from some fish I have never seen before. They were a little bigger than the snappers, maybe 5-6 inches long, with very distinct thick vertical black and white stripes. I have never, ever seen these at the marina in all of my years. Any ideas what they are?

Oh yeah, this was near the mouth of the Bass River on the Cape.

i think what you saw was a sheepshead .....that are normally common to florida. They will only eat shrimp generally. They have goatlike teeth and actually croak and make a funny sound when caught ...sounds strange i know, but fish that are uncommonly found in many different areas are showing up everywhere!
heres a picture....

It coulda been tinker mackeral too... We hae that down here sometimes lat ein the summer!

BC

Raven, that's it. Thanks, I would have never known.

ive seen alot of those down the vinyard spearfishing around the ferry docks and especially at the entrance to that wicked big pond.
me and my dad were at the motuh of the bass river too and saw them too, lots of em. they were following plugs too. now i know what they are.

Aren't sheepshead bottom dwellers??

i was fishing down in Sarasota florida one day off of a wall and the water was 8 feet deep and crystal clear. The sheepshead were huge there but extremely wary and smart. they would swim right around a bait if they saw a hook. So i threw out 8 shrimp in a straight line or trail since i could see so well and had my second to last shrimp with my hook in it. Sure enough i watched this huge sheepshead come along and one by one gobble down each shrimp in my bait trail until he got to my hook and line and i managed to catch him. They're reported to be excellent eating so i filleted him and put him in the freezer. The next day i took him out to thaw and my cat got interested in the sheepshead fillet and knocked it off the kitchen counter where she and the dog ate it. :af: