This red stuck jig and soft-bait tail.

For heaven’s sake leave the live bait alone. One of the wonders of dock fishing is the tremendous variety of fish that will strike an artificial lure. If you can make your cast, retrieve and quickly reposition it, you can often catch a lot more than you would chucking a clunky bait into the area. There’s more satisfaction and less mess with lures. It’s a riot watching a monster snook clobber a mullet next to a seawall, but if you’re prospecting one dock to the next over the course of a few hours, slinging bait just doesn’t feel right.

There’s often some surface action to be had around docks, but you’ll get the most bites from the greatest variety of fish in the lower half of the water column. A light jig, say about 1⁄8-ounce per 2 feet of depth, is effective. Bucktail or soft-plastic tail, your choice. I tend to favor jigs with wide-gap, tinned hooks in the 4/0 range—sharp but strong enough to hold onto a snook if you have to put the wood to it. I have big ambitions when I fish docks. I like a 3- or 4-inch twin-tail “shad” type tail in light colors—or no color at all. White seems to work as fine as anything, but I’m sure you’ll find one that works better.

The one bait I do like to carry when dock fishing is fresh shrimp. If the snook and redfish action is slow, you can often fill in the gap with sheepshead or snapper. Anchor a little uptide or just off the tip of a dock, and cast a small, tail-hooked shrimp on a No. 1 hook, 20-pound leader and a couple of splitshot. It’s amazing how often those vertical stripes turn into a single black lateral line.

There is no season for dock fishing. The snook bite best when the water temp is over 70. Bluefish seem to be year-round residents on the Indian River, and big seatrout have their own calendar. Sheepshead seem to be most abundant in winter, but that may be more a function of water clarity than anything else. It could be that the sheepies are just easier to see then. Redfish are without question year-round dock inhabitants. Little jacks are a nuisance and now and then a 30-pounder will pulverize a plug and recapture your respect for the species.

The best thing to do is to get out there and look.

FS