The age old answer to the question of “When is the best time to fish?” is “Whenever you can.” Last week at Captain John Ward’s seminar on fishing for Spanish mackerel and bluefish I was waiting to see what he would say about the stages of the tide. During his seminar I did not hear him mention it and I thought people would like to know what tide was best for catching these fish around the harbor. Knowing what his answer would be, I asked him, but his reply was not what I expected. He said that he had his best luck on incoming tide. It threw me for a loop because I had always fished the outgoing tide and planned my fishing trips to target these fish based on the tides in the harbor.
I thought back to the point when I started fishing the outgoing and can not really remember a particular point. When I was a kid, my dad and I caught plenty of large bluefish (3-5lbs) along the banks of Drum Island. It was a given that the fish were going to show up on the outgoing and you could see them coming from 100 yards away. The birds would show up and then the frenzied blues would begin busting the surface. We started fishing other areas of the harbor when the blues quit biting and would stumble upon jacks and schools of Spanish mackerel in the process. This type of fishing became more of a standby. If we did not have luck on another species we knew we could always go do this and catch fish. Years later I found some great trout fishing in some of the same areas on outgoing tide and we fished the same patterns with great success.
The beauty of fishing is just when you think you know it all you are brought up just a little bit short. John’s answer totally turned me on my head and made me realize how many great nights I missed out on fishing my favorite areas because “the tide was not right”. Obviously certain types of fishing require certain tides, such as targeting tailing reds in the grass, but many times we get stuck on a certain tide because we’ve had success and we keep going back around the same tides beca