Farm-raising pigfish has the potential to supply inshore anglers with top trout biats for years to come.

When I asked about how he hooked his pigfish and where he fished them, he explained, “I use a 3/0 livebait hook and insert it into the pigfish just behind the anal fin. I have a bobber above it and cast the rigged bait over grass where I suspect there to be good trout.”

He went on.

“If the grass is in four feet of water, I’ll put the bobber three feet above the pigfish. I want him to struggle and grunt as he tries to get back down into the grass. If you don’t use a bobber, the pigfish will get down in the grass and hide. Then you will have to twitch your line to get him to grunt.”

“Do you use them in places other than on grassflats?” I asked.

The smile began to creep back on his face once again. “At night around the docks. Beats a shrimp, hands down.” He went on to explain that while a large trout or snook might take a shrimp floated close by, when they hear a pigfish grunting, they begin searching aggressively until they find it. This means that strikes could come a few feet away from the pilings and, as a result, more fish are likely to be brought boatside.

Captain Pat McGriff guides out of Keaton Beach in the Big Bend area on Florida’s west coast and has a different approach for obtaining and fishing his pigfish. McGriff has 35 years of trout fishing experience and starts a charter with about 100 assorted pigfish, pinfish, grunts, croakers and squirrelfish in his livewell. All these he takes from traps he sets. Nonetheless, he wants to have the freshest baits possible and he works hard to catch still more while his clients are fishing for trout.

I had the chance to fish with and observe how McGriff went about catching his baitfish late last summer. “I have two livewells on board, one for the baitfish we start with and one for the fresh ones I catch,” he began. “We’ll be fishing with those I catch which, hopefully, will be pigfish. The others are just backups in case we need them.”

I asked why he preferred pigfish to the other kinds of baitfish he had in his livewell and his answer was similar to what Richard Patten’s had been on the east coast.

“Trout recognize the grunting noises that pigfish make. They don’t have to search about looking for a meal. They can be 100 percent certain that if they move to the source of the sound, a desirable meal will be waiting for them. They just have to capture it.”

To catch his pigfish, he uses a small spinning rod and reel combo with 8- to 10-pound line. Onto this, he ties a “hairhook” like those used to catch golden shiners (size 16 Mustad No. 3191). A few inches above the hook, he adds a pinch of lead weight. He then puts a small piece of synthetic bait, about the size of a No. 7 swivel, onto the tiny hook. After baiting his hook, he flips the rig out on the opposite side of the boat from where his clients are fishing. When his baited hook hits bottom, he closes the bail and after making a couple of slight pops of his rod, he lifts his light rig off the bottom. A baitfish is usually attached, hopefully a pigfish.

McGriff’s approach to soaking pigfish is also different from Patten’s. Whereas Patten wants his pigfish to struggle about a foot above the bottom and adjusts his bobber to changing depths in order to achieve this, McGriff wants his pigfish to be suspended mid-depth in deeper water below a weighted surface attractor. The surface attractor, an oval float with plastic and brass beads that bang into each other when the rodtip is popped, sounds like a feeding fish. Trout come to investigate the possibility of an easy meal and hence it is referred to as an “attractor.”