I went out yesterday afternoon with my fiancé to see if the flounder bite is still as hot as it has been the past couple of weeks. With a livewell full of mullet and shrimp, we motored over to AR-315 to find a medley of boats – there were about 10 clustered around the wreck, most of them trolling and I also talked to a couple of people drifting for flounder. As they weren’t using live-bait, they hadn’t caught more than a couple of fish. Tired of that mess, we went over to a spot of structure I know of and anchored up. Within 10 minutes, we had 5 legal flounder in the boat. The bite was automatic – as soon as it hit the bottom. In 2 hours we managed 19 keeper-sized flounder, a couple of shorts and one 2lb seabass. There are so many flounder huddled on these wrecks and live-bottoms that you don’t even have to worry about pinfish or blues killing your bait– the bite is that hot. The best part about this was that we only worked one little piece of structure – had we moved around, we could have caught literally hundreds of fish. The majority of the fish were smaller than last week (most were between 15 and 18 inches), but we did manage one 4.5lb fish. Again, had we worked the area more thoroughly, we could have picked up larger fish. We kept three for dinner and released the rest.
After we were all floundered out, we headed over to the inlet to see if we could find some working Spanish. There were birds (and no boats), and voila – lots of busting fish. The only problem is that they weren’t Spanish – large pods of albacore. The only problem with these guys is that they were all 1lb peanut albies who weren’t really interested in any baits larger than about 1cm (not even tiny flies). With fish busting all around the boat I almost forgot it was June and ended up wasting about 45 minutes trying to hook up with one of these pint-sized juvenile albies. In the end, I did manage to land one on a stingsilver and he posed for the camera before release(see below). After that, we worked back towards the inlet and found some birds and Spanish – worked them for about 15 minutes and caught three fish in the 17inch range on spec-rigs. If you know where to look, the fishin’ is simply hot..
I went out yesterday afternoon with my fiancé to see if the flounder bite is still as hot as it has been the past couple of weeks. With a livewell full of mullet and shrimp, we motored over to AR-315 to find a medley of boats – there were about 10 clustered around the wreck, most of them trolling and I also talked to a couple of people drifting for flounder. As they weren’t using live-bait, they hadn’t caught more than a couple of fish. Tired of that mess, we went over to a spot of structure I know of and anchored up. Within 10 minutes, we had 5 legal flounder in the boat. The bite was automatic – as soon as it hit the bottom. In 2 hours we managed 19 keeper-sized flounder, a couple of shorts and one 2lb seabass. There are so many flounder huddled on these wrecks and live-bottoms that you don’t even have to worry about pinfish or blues killing your bait– the bite is that hot. The best part about this was that we only worked one little piece of structure – had we moved around, we could have caught literally hundreds of fish. The majority of the fish were smaller than last week (most were between 15 and 18 inches), but we did manage one 4.5lb fish. Again, had we worked the area more thoroughly, we could have picked up larger fish. We kept three for dinner and released the rest.
After we were all floundered out, we headed over to the inlet to see if we could find some working Spanish. There were birds (and no boats), and voila – lots of busting fish. The only problem is that they weren’t Spanish – large pods of albacore. The only problem with these guys is that they were all 1lb peanut albies who weren’t really interested in any baits larger than about 1cm (not even tiny flies). With fish busting all around the boat I almost forgot it was June and ended up wasting about 45 minutes trying to hook up with one of these pint-sized juvenile albies. In the end, I did manage to land one on a stingsilver and he posed for the camera before release(see below). After that, we worked back towards the inlet and found some birds and Spanish – worked them for about 15 minutes and caught three fish in the 17inch range on spec-rigs. If you know where to look, the fishin’ is simply hot..
