How to Use Barnacles for Awesome Sheepshead Fishing

Sheepies consider barnacles as a tasty meal. Here's how to take advantage of that fact.

December 03, 2025 By Ed Mashburn

Anyone who spends any time at all on the Florida coast will encounter barnacles—those ubiquitous, sharp-edged little critters that soon cover any sort of firm surface which spends time underwater. Stepping barefoot on a barnacle-covered surface can produce some painful, fairly deep cuts, and fiberglass gelcoat boat hulls can be severely damaged with repeated and long-term contact with barnacle encrusted surfaces. And of course, the thing that makes anglers cuss barnacles the most is their ability to slice fishing line very efficiently. A hooked fish that gets a line across a barnacle covered dock piling is soon a free fish. But there just might be more to barnacles than being trouble for anglers.

What are Barnacles?

Of the more than 1,400 species of barnacles found in the world’s waterways, the most common ones are called acorn barnacles. Barnacles secrete a fast-curing cement that is among the most powerful natural glues known—the glue is so strong that researchers are trying to figure out how it can be used commercially.

Barnacles like places with lots of water movement like intertidal zones, where they reside on sturdy objects like rocks, pilings, and buoys. Moving objects like boat and ship hulls and sea turtles are particularly vulnerable to the pesky critters.

Barnacles feed through feather-like appendages called cirri. As the cirri rapidly extend and retract through the opening at the top of the barnacle, they comb the water for microscopic organisms. They quickly withdraw into their protective shells if they sense a potential threat. Barnacles secrete hard calcium plates that completely encase them. A white cone made up of six calcium plates forms a circle around the crustacean. Four more plates form a “door” that the barnacle can open or close, depending on the tide. When the tide goes out, the barnacle closes up shop to conserve moisture. As the tide comes in, a muscle opens the door so the feathery cirri can sift for food.

Bridge piling covered with barnacles. — A barnacle-clad dock piling is likely to attract sheepshead. Scrape some off and you may really herd the sheepies into range.

Chum, Chum, Ring the Dinner Bell

For some fish, primarily those black and white striped sheepshead, barnacles are a prime item on their diet. Sheepshead are made to feed on barnacles—those big sheepshead teeth are perfect tools to nip off barnacles and then crush them up.

Knowing how much sheepies love to eat barnacles, many inshore sheepshead specialists have a handy tool—a small straight edged garden spade with which they scrape off barnacles from dock pilings and cement bridge structures. These scraped off barnacles drift down, and if there are any sheepshead in the area, a feeding frenzy soon develops. A school of sheepshead is a very competitive group, and when free food starts drifting down, a hot bite for anglers is assured.

With this fondness on the part of sheepshead for barnacle chum, some savvy anglers who want to catch sheepshead without the expense of buying live shrimp or fiddler crabs have come up with a great plan. Why not use the free barnacles themselves as bait?

An advantage of using barnacles for sheepshead fishing is that barnacles are available any day, any time of the year. Quite often in winter—prime sheepshead time—live shrimp and fiddler crabs can be very difficult to find in bait and tackle shops. But if we just scrape the pilings or dock structure, gather up a pail of barnacles, we’re ready to go sheepshead fishing.

Oyster shell covered in barnacles. — Barnacles adhered to an oyster shell.

Prime Sheepshead Bait

The first step to using barnacles as bait is to collect a pile of them. Scraping dock pilings or bridge pilings can produce a hatful of barnacles in a short time. A small hand paint scraper does a good job of removing the barnacles, but be careful. A too energetic scrape can put a hand in contact with the barnacles still on the piling surface, and blood will flow.

Barnacles are a little bit of a challenge to actually place on a hook. The point of the hook should be carefully pushed up from the hard bottom of the shell and the point should come all the way through and out the narrow top of the shell. It may take a couple of barnacles on the hook if the barnacles are small. A No. 2 kahle hook is my preferred hook, but circle hooks and even J hooks will work—it’s up to the angler.

A number of sheepshead specialists have good results with special pivoting jig heads. Select a weight which allows the barnacles to sink quickly, but is not too heavy. A 3⁄8-ounce jig head works well in most conditions.

If there’s a drawback to using barnacles for bait, sometimes other fish like black drum and even redfish will take a barnacle loaded hook intended for sheepshead. Most anglers can figure out how to deal with this situation when it occurs.

The best way to find and catch sheepshead when using barnacles is to simply drop the baited hook straight down next to the structure. To be accurate, barnacles are pretty insecure on a hook, and they don’t stay on the hook well for casting. But they work just fine when lowered gently into the water column.

Quite often, anglers will find more success when the barnacle is dropped as close to the structure as possible—this is often the best location to find the sheepshead. The same structure that the barnacles were scraped from is invariably one of the the best places to catch sheepshead.

And just a hint: If a hook baited with barnacles is dropped close to a structure and no bites are coming, it’s time to move. Sheepshead are not there. Sheepshead bite barnacle baited hooks very fast—they can’t resist that free meal of their favorite natural food.