Sometimes it pays to pick up and move; other times it’s best to wait for the reds to come to you.
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Should I stay or should I go now? It’s a question I often find myself asking when redfish are the target.
I always smile as the ghost of Joe Strummer bellows his famous inquiry across the boat. It’s a “clash” of angling preferences: sit and wait, or look for new water?
Sight-fishing has become such a mainstay of our angling that it seems natural to keep on the move. We pole, bump the trolling motor, wade, paddle, whatever, to cover as much water as we can. Riddled with anxiety, our vision of El Dorado is a square tail flicking above the surface, maybe a copper missile crossing a pothole in a grassflat.
That kind of active hunting in extreme shallows can make for great fishing, but some days, it’s little more than good exercise. Some days it’s downright stressful.
Subtle changes in sun angle, current and other factors—including local fishing pressure—may conspire to make reds awfully hard to find on the flats. When you do find them, they may be tight-lipped, aware of the sound or sight of your approach.
I’ve seen days on Pine Island Sound and the Indian River when schools of sheepshead would blow out from the boat, setting off a chain reaction spooking every red within half a mile. Mullet can do the same thing. So can boats with goons at the wheel.
Sometimes it makes better sense to pick a fishy spot and just sit still, fishing like we used to in the old days. Docks, mangrove shorelines, oyster bars, passes—these are intercept points where, on the right tide, you’ll often run into more bites per hour by staying put. Remember that reds are foragers; it’s in their nature to move in pursuit of food.
Captain Scott Hughes of Fort Myers is well-versed in both approaches, and on a recent trip on Pine Island Sound, he and I split our day about fifty-fifty, sight-fishing and still-fishing. Hughes runs charters on a boat much like my own—a larger skiff easier to propel by trolling motor than pushpole. At low tide, on a skinny, channel-edge grassflat, we found a classic sight-fish setup: A school of a dozen or so reds, slowly digging, making little swirls with their tails as they eased along. I threw a plastic-tail jig about three feet in front of the fish, reeled tight and twitched the rodtip…once. A fat one immediately sucked in the jig and made a typical schoolie redfish ruckus, shaking bright bronze on the surface.
Unfortunately, its schoolmates departed. The tide was coming in pretty quickly. On the lower Gulf Coast of Florida, tailing redfish action is usually confined to a window around the end of the outgoing and the beginning of an incoming tide. When the water gets deep enough to conceal their whereabouts, it’s curtains for sight-fishing.
A good approach on busy waters: Anchcoring and still-fishing a mangrove point.
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“Those fish’ll probably move up under the mangroves with this higher water,” Hughes said.
We staked off a couple of shady shoreline points, spending no more than 20 minutes at each one. Simplifying this stop-and-go process, Hughes has an electric staking device on his transom; at the flip of a switch, a spider-leg apparatus pokes a stiff spike and holds bottom. In lieu of this, a pushpole or small anchor attached to nylon rode can be used for quick stops. The point is, still-fishing doesn’t have to—make that shouldn’t—mean hanging in one spot all day. It just means staying put long enough to capture the interest of roving reds.
Under the canopy of mangroves we soaked live whitebait and chunks of cut ladyfish. Both worked equally well—which should come as encouragement to Gulf Coasters who fret about finding and cast-netting whitebait. Ladyfish are easy to catch on a small jig out over deep grass, say four to six feet. Two or three of average size provide enough 3⁄4-inch steaks to keep you in the game. “This is without a doubt one of the best redfish baits,” said Hughes. “It’s oily, shiny and won’t get pecked off the hook by pinfish and other scavengers.”
Author plays the wading game.
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Rigging is a cinch. Simply pin the steak on a 1⁄4-ounce jighead and you’re done. If there’s a lot of current or water deeper than five feet, use a slightly heavier jig, or perhaps a sliding sinker rig with an ounce or so of lead. The jighead is handy as it reduces the amount of terminal gear and re-rigging you’ll do on a typical day of mixed-bag fishing. When you’re ready to move, say prospect for seatrout on the grassflats, simply add a grubtail, shad-tail, shrimp-tail and or some other soft plastic in place of the ladyfish.
Chunks of mullet, ballyhoo, pinfish, crab: The list of things a redfish will eat is far longer than what they will not eat. Live versions can be dynamite, too—especially on open water flats— but in close quarters, it seems the olfactory attraction of a piece of cutbait may be stronger.
Hughes and I caught probably a dozen reds in a few hours, even tallied a snook jump-and-release.
Reds under the bushes are sneaky. They can come and go without you knowing, slithering beneath the shadows, leaving no trace. Staked off in clean water and light-sand bottom, you might spot a fish or two prowling the edge of the trees. This opens up the possibility of a hybrid style of redfishing: Sight-fishing from a stationary boat.
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One of the more memorable instances when this paid off for me was on a recent trip on my home waters near Fort Pierce. Here, the southern end of the ribbon-like Indian River Lagoon isn’t as densely populated with reds as the northern end, where the sprawling Banana River and Mosquito Lagoon complexes host year-round schools of breeding-size fish. Nor does it hold a candle, redfish-wise, to Pine Island Sound and many Gulf Coast waterways. Trout and snook? Some of the biggest on the planet. Reds? Catch one here and it’s a gambit for conversation, particularly if caught deliberately.
On a misty, pre-cold front winter day, Florida Sportsman Field Editor Buck Hall and I poked around a mangrove shoreline looking for seatrout. We found them schooled up on the deep side of a long shelf about 40 feet off the mangroves. I pulled us in tight to the bushes with my trolling motor, where we began throwing 3-inch white jerkbaits and enjoying banner trout action. Munching on a sandwich between casts, I noticed a copper-colored shadow out of the corner of my left eye. The fish emerged from the prop roots of a red mangrove and cruised slowly across a raceway of white sand. Minutes earlier I’d seen one just like it and made an unsuccessful cast.
“Buck; quick, throw out in front of him,” I gasped. “That fish is as long as your leg!”
Quietly covering water on the trolling motor.
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Buck made a perfect cast. The fish jumped all over his jig and put up a great fight on light spinning gear.
I’ve seen countless scenarios like this, all around the state, but more often than not it comes as a surprise. We demonstrated how blending approaches—sight-fishing while site-fishing—can be a good way to intercept reds.
Lower Tampa Bay is laced with mangrove creeks, and reds here move in and out with the tides, often riding herd on schools of mullet. One day last fall, my friend Capt. Geoff Page invited me to fish a few special creeks he’d picked out. The water wasn’t quite clear or shallow enough for genuine sight-fishing, but Page was more interested in fan-casting certain bars along the creeks and outside shorelines.
We eased up inside one creek, trolling motor on low power. My companion and I tossed small jigheads with a green-and-white, soft-plastic shad tail. Mullet rippled the surface.
“Right in this corner, there’ll be one after the other,” Page said. And he was right. There was a steady parade of reds moving out with the tide; repeated casting in their neighborhood earned us a steady parade of bent rods.
When the tide got too low for the creeks, Page suggested a change of venue. We loaded the boat, had lunch and trailered to Sarasota Bay. For some fishing guides, this kind of large-scale assault would be unusual. Worse yet, Page expresses a vocal aversion to natural baits.
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We got along splendidly.
The tide was nearing its ebb, siphoning dry a long stretch of sand and seagrass which bisects Sarasota Bay at about its midpoint. Rather than stay on the move, as we did in Tampa Bay, Page suggested anchoring up and wading. And waiting.
“See those white holes?” he said, gesturing to the north. “There’s a long trough of slightly deeper water; when the tide gets real low, the reds will push up this line—following the mullet—and move into the holes. All we have to do is sit here and wait for them.”
We weren’t scouting for tailers, and at the same time we weren’t soaking bait. There was just enough motivation for an accurate cast to keep us interested. In its own way, fishing potholes is mentally relaxing; you pick out a likely looking spot, fire your jig, then hop it through the danger zone. When a jig stops suddenly—which it did several times for us—and you realize it’s not hung on seagrass, there’s a satisfaction that wells up under your collar.
Page produced the biggest fish, a giant melon of a red, with vivid copper scales that reflected the afternoon sunlight. The water was clear, and it was surprising, in a way, that there were pods of such bright fish tunneling unseen through turtlegrass just a few yards from our boat.
Had we stayed on the pushpole, we may have spotted one or two, but it was apparent that here was another case where staying put was the key. Effectively boxed out of other parts of the bay, the fish were clearly moving with the tide, heading for that forage-rich slough of deeper water.
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