Get to the Point for Great Inshore Fishing

• Affiliate Disclosure: This page contains affiliate links. We earn from qualifying purchases.

---

Of all the habitat features Gulf Coast anglers may target, few can boast the consistency of a point. Now, before people start shouting out their personal favorites, consider that just about every form of natural and manmade structure includes some type of point.

Large or small, prominent or subtle, protrusions of any form offer two main predatory advantages. First, they serve as tidal breaks, behind which anyone with an appetite can dodge current, but still leverage its forage-delivery. Also, points are gathering spots, where baitfish and crustaceans meander around a structure’s finality.

Speckled trout, redfish, snook, sheepshead, black drum, and more know the value of exploring — and often positioning — adjacent to a point. Here’s a handful of examples.

Island Time

In the Homosassa area, Captain William Toney knows he’ll find dependable speckled trout and snook action on the points of mangrove islands at the mouth of the Homosassa River. The west facing points bear the greatest tidal scouring and, therefore, display bare limestone, which warms in the morning sun.

Early mornings offer topwater action and higher water makes your popping cork rigs fitted with paddle tails or shrimp lures a good bet.

One of Toney’s go-tos is a DOA 5.5 glow jerkbait nose-pierced with a 3/0 Owner SSW needle point bait hook. Sharp twitches make this simple rig dart and cut like a nervous baitfish.

Elsewhere, while barrier islands terminate into softer, more gradual tips, they still present a point, in terms of the narrowing shallows dropping into deeper water. Find the ones with scattered rock and shell and you’ll have a crustacean and mollusk bounty that’ll surely interest your redfish, black drum and sheepshead.

Also, when summer finds mature snook stacking in coastal passes and dispersing along Gulf beaches, egg-heavy females await the strong “moon” tides, which carry their fertilized eggs seaward for the necessary suspension phase. When these aggregations occur, island points with deep channel drops are money.

Mangrove Points

During a past trip to the Chassahowitzka area, Toney found a pile of snook willing to blast our jig/paddle tails along the western face of Chassahowitzka Point, but as we moved toward the southern tip of this outer mangrove colony, he noticed rippling on the other side of the point.

While we eased toward the point, a crimson convoy suddenly roiled the water, as hundreds of stout slot sized reds scooted around this natural travel lane. Jigs and spoons bent the rods.

Fishing the Crystal River to Yankeetown waters, Capt. Brandon Branch also pays attention to those mangrove points, particularly the ones with a good stretch of shallow bar extending off the tip. Reds often graze the perimeters, but snook strategically stage here during moving tides and pick off mullet, sardines and anyone that’s not watching their six.

Here, Branch often throws a Slayer Inc. 4 1/2 inch swimbait or a 3/8-ounce Z-Man ChatterBait with a paddletail. The latter’s flash and vibration presents a boisterous target, while that paddletail keeps the bait higher in shallow water to prevent snags.

Within denser mangrove basins, you’ll often find tidal trenches off the points facing daily flow. Where the water wraps around an island, depths remain fairly constant, but the repetitive ebb and flow subjects the softer substrate to relentless dredging and carves the perfect little staging spot for savvy snook awaiting their predictable feeding windows.

Often, you’ll ease past these gullies and see snook stacked like cordwood, just waiting for the right combination of current and warmth to make ‘em open their mouths. When that happens, pops, boils, and busts signal peak feeding.

It’s hard to beat live sardines or pinfish, but don’t hesitate to work your paddle tails or soft jerkbaits through these areas. When the bite is one, a well-placed topwater walker will draw crushing response.

For a creative presentation, hang a swimbait like the LIVETARGET Pinfish or Sardine under a popping cork and drift it past the snook lair. A cast-and-retrieve presentation works, but the cork rig offers a user-friendly tide-riding option that maintains a constant depth.

Oyster Bars

Centers of life, these mollusk mounds offer vast munching opportunities for a host of inshore faves, but those deeper points often shine. Low-tide waiting rooms, or high water feeding zones, these drop-offs merit attention.

One of the most incredible inshore catches I ever witnessed occurred while my group was fishing the deep point of an oyster laden spoil bank on the south side of the Anclote River. One of our anglers tossed a live white bait toward the bar’s point — a popular snook spot — but on this day, a feisty cobia elbowed his way past the linesiders and launched an epic battle that literally conclude at Anclote Key’s western beach.

Another memorable oyster point day occurred during a trip with Yankeetown’s Capt. Ky Lewis, during which we approached the deep drop of a bar near Crystal River. My wife Mercy fired first and not 10 seconds after she cast her belly-hooked sardine toward the tip of an oyster bar, she came tight on the first of several redfish. I added another red, followed by a couple of juvenile gag grouper.

I made our last shot at that bar — but not by choice; rather, the requisite response to an aggressive bite. After a couple of those juvie gags, I switched from live bait to a MirrOlure MirrOdine and fired that sardine imitator toward the bar’s shallow edge, a few yards from the drop-off. The game plan — imitate a baitfish ambling down the bar and into the adjacent depths.

Apparently, the ruse worked because I had, maybe 3 seconds to twitch my twitchbait before somebody grabbed it, hit the afterburners and prompted Lewis to give chase. We followed the unseen speedster for 5 minutes and put a football field between us and the bar before a heart-wrenching break-off.

(I’m guessing a big jack crevalle, so if anyone catches an inshore tuna with a MirrOlure MirrOdine in his lip, I’d like my lure back, please.)

---

---