There's no mistaking an amberjack hookup. They pull like the dickens and sometimes it takes two people to boat one. Fish this size are abundant on deep reefs off Northeast Florida.

All the right ingredients for great snapper and grouper action converge just about due east of Daytona Beach. Up here you have lots of structure, a good variety of species and enough open ocean to spread out and avoid traffic.

Depending on who you travel with, you might have the final and probably most important ingredient, that bookful of GPS or loran numbers.

Don’t get me wrong: There are some terrific public reefs in this area, and at times they hold their share of fish. Since 1970, the Ponce DeLeon Inlet Port Authority (under various names) has been deploying all sorts of structure offshore. There are old ships, barges, bridge rubble, telephone poles, culverts and more, in 65 to 80 feet of water. Over time, corals and other invertebrates cover these structures, and they become attractive to small fish and crustaceans. Amid mostly featureless, sandy bottom, the manmade reefs offer shelter and food for bottom-hugging grouper and snapper.

You can find latitude and longitude coordinates for these and more reefs on commercial charts, via the Internet and through other sources. After you’ve explored sites like these, though, the logical next step is looking farther offshore, to deeper natural structure.

Red snapper are a dime a dozen at the best numbers, often deep natural ledges.

Probably no one in this area has a book as coveted as that of Capt. John Lloyd, captain of the 46-foot Triple Header. Lloyd has been a charter captain for over 20 years; his family has been fishing out of Ponce Inlet since the 1930s. He has numbers for little spots in deep water that no one else has. He’s found many of them in the same way a new angler might: hunting around with sonar while trolling, exploring the perimeter of known sites, conferring with trusted sources. He’s just been doing it a lot longer than most of us.

Early one morning, I watched while Lloyd pored over a gnarly notebook that looked to have been left to him by an early member of that family clan. Meanwhile, the mate was busy readying stout rods with 4/0 reels, gathering lead weights, sharpening hooks and jigs, and tending to frozen bait, a mixture of squid, herring, sardines and chunks of bonito.

We were getting set for a trip out of the Fishin’ Store, where many of the charterboats in this area dock.

We soon departed. On our way to the fishing grounds, we stopped to catch live bait with sabiki rigs at a place where birds were diving on baitfish flickering on the surface. What followed looked like a fire drill as the mate scurried between anglers removing baitfish and placing the livies in the livewell in a corner of the cockpit. Occasionally, he paused to replace a sabiki rig cut by a kingfish or barracuda (note to self: light spinning rod and a flashy jig on a trace of wire would be heaps of fun here). Soon, more than a hundred small herring, blue runners, pinfish, pilchards and grunts shared the circular livewell.

Load up on live bait with sabiki rigs.

With sufficient bait, we continued our eastward trek. A little more than an hour after clearing the bell-buoy at Ponce Inlet, we were in water just over 200 feet deep. Lloyd slowed the Triple Header to idle and precisely maneuvered into position. “Drop ‘em,” he called out from the bridge.

Simultaneously, we lowered our lines and five 12-ounce lead sinkers plummeted toward the rocky ledge. We were careful to control the speed of the descent so we did not overrun the spool. Almost immediately, the bite was on.

The ledge we were fishing is one of many along this part of the coast, remnants of geologic change long ago. As you move offshore along the upper Florida Atlantic coast, the continental shelf does not drop steadily to abyssal depths, but does so in intervals. Initially, the bottom is smooth and drops gradually for a few miles until you reach a ledge. Along the ledge, the bottom is irregular with jagged crevices and undercut ledges that parallel the coastline. Beyond the ledge, the bottom is again smooth but drops more rapidly this time for several more miles until yet another irregular ledge appears. Beyond this second ledge, the bottom is once again smooth and falls off even more steeply into the depths. The ledges offer bottom species hiding places for security and an area from which to ambush smaller baitfish and crustaceans, as well as a break from fighting the Gulf Stream currents. Between Port Canaveral and Ponce Inlet, ledges like these run roughly along the 21- and 27-fathom curves. A 28-fathom ledge runs off Ponce Inlet, as well.