The inshore bite the last several days has been hot! Clean water, good drifts, mild weather have come together to make for some great fishing! When winds have gotten up lots of fishermen are still catching fish. Fishermen who have said they struggled catching fish are coming to dock with some nice seatrout, redfish and flounder.
Fall is great time of the year for inshore! Shrimp is the primary bait! Those desiring to pitch artificals or a fly will find seatrout and redfish will take these with abandon. Tides look good throughout the week. Generally, seatrout generally bite best on incoming tides around points or spots where the current is channeled by some kind of structure: sandbars, oyster rakes, rocks, marshgrass, rip rap, etc.. Seatrout can be at any level in the water column. Seatrout are sight and sound feeders. Rattle or popping cork will work well this of the year. Popping a standard float will likely produce more strikes than letting your cork sit. An ideal method of fishing is to pitch your float rig in the drift and let line out until your float has finished it’s drift. A typical drift might be 100 feet or longer. Sometime fishermen will find a magic spot where the fish just bite. A good cast is one that land short of the target and gently floats into the strike zone. Rod position is critical! This sound simple and it is as long your rod is pointing toward the float. A standard rod position will be about 45 degrees. When the float go down waiting a second or two can mean all the difference in catching a fish or not. A firm but gentle hook set usually works the best. Fighting the fish should be done with care. It’s easy to rip a hook out of large trout. Seatrout have notoriously weak or soft mouths. Seatrout are on the move coming off of spring tides. This means they hungry, schooled up and on the move in search of food! These fish will usually be present for an hour or two then gone. These are mercurial, a little like stripers, here one day and gone the next. When these fish are biting it’s easy to get caught in “trout fever”. Fishermen get so excited they lose their judgement. The result can be sloppy fishing or worse keeping over the legal limit of fish. Stay within the limits! Better yet practice catch and release or keep a few and release the rest!
Tip of the Week
Work the current for seatrout, fish structure for redfish. When possible practice and release!
Good Fishing! Capt. Jack McGowan