With a delayed winter, a windy start to Spring and strange weather coming through at a rapid rate thanks to our friend El Nino, it’s not the ideal time to fish, unless you like targeting big trout as the fronts continue come through.
It’s widely known that trout love overcast and rainy weather. It seems like the worse the weather is, the better they will bite. Through the warm fall and early winter, many anglers wondered just where all the trout were. They were tough to and and harder to catch. Now they are showing up and ready to bite for anglers and the trout are big ones at that.
On a recent bad weather day in a cold north breeze, Capt. Chris Wiggins landed three trout over 25 inches with one nearly 30 inches. Those are trophy-sized trout. Capt. Wiggins likes to fish dock lines with medium-sized shrimp and a small split shot above the hook. He works the shrimp like a lure, slowly twitching them along the bottom. By the end of the day, his clients had landed 30 trout.
Fishing for big trout often means that you are looking for a single fish or small groups of sh. On colder days, when the sun is out, the fish might be up in shallows (1-2 feet of water) where it warms up more quickly and they are rarely expending energy. During pre-front days, they’ll be on the move, actively looking for their next meal.
Artificial lures like Yo-Zuri pencils that can “walk- the-dog” or suspending baits like Crystal Minnows could entice the bigger fish to bite. This can occur on the edge of deeper grass flats where they wait for their next meal. In shallow water or at low tide, a single gator trout could be sitting in a sand hole the size of a bucket or as large as a basketball court.
Small trout tend to await prey in similar areas, but you may nd that when you’re catching schools of trout, they tend to all be a similar size. When the bite is on, it’s not uncommon to catch a few dozen, or more trout, in the same spot. For these smaller sized sh, jigs and soft plastics can entice a hot bite. Bring a dehooker or a pair of Mustad pliers to unhook and handle small trout as little as possible.
This year, I experienced a new way to fish the cooler water temperatures. A traditional pattern on the Big Bend would be to anchor up-tide and fish the bottom with jig heads tipped with shrimp in holes, river mouths and oyster bars. It’s a technique that has been tried and true for decades, on our coast. I admittedly grew up using live bait, so I was eager to learn new techniques for cooler water artificial fishing with Captain Mark Brady, Captain Jimmy Nelson and Luiza Barros.
I began by throw- ing my favorite topwater lure. I love throwing the biggest topwater I can find from sunrise until mid-morning, while the sun is at a low angle. It typically produces action – at least when the water is above 75-degrees. On this particular morning, I stuck with my topwater out of pure stubbornness, like a dog with its favorite bone. It didn’t work, but going to a super slow artificial did the trick. It took about 15 minutes to break every habit I had with artificial lures. I am accustomed to fishing lures fast, violent and aggressively, but I eventually slowed it down to a mind numbingly slow pace. Within minutes I had a solid 23 trout and then one after another. Luiza plucked a few on her Mambo Mullet by Egret Baits and Jimmy popped a few on his Yo-Zuri Crystal Minnow.
There were a few key points to our success. The retrieval rate must be S-L-O-W. I’m talking as slow as one of those Twilight movie plots (no, I’ve never watched one). When you think you’re working slow enough, add more time. The un- spoken secret to fishing on the flats, this time of year, is that there’s virtually no bait on the flats, so if you can keep the lure in the strike zone long enough, you increase the odds of a bite tenfold.
I don’t always advise heading out when the conditions turn poor, but if you’ve got a sense of adventure and you want to bend a rod, it can lead to fish that really want to eat.
Changing conditions mean fish are on the move. Fish on the move mean energy expelled and energy expelled means feeding time to replenish. With the rapidly changing weather, trout should be eating.
For more captains that capitalize on our trout fishery, visit Outdoors360.com for recommended guides and additional information & videos.
