Ok, I’ve had my fourth unproductive inshore trip and I’m getting a little frustrated.
Background: I grew up freshwater fishing (bass, bream, catfish, etc) around this same area, but my dad never really cared for saltwater so I never really learned that type of fishing growing up, though recently its caught my interest (seems a waste to live this close to the ocean and not take advantage of it).
I’ve mostly been hoping to catch Spottail and Sea Trout, though any “nice” fish would be good (Black Drum, Flounder, etc). I’ve been out 4 times now and all we’ve caught is about a dozen Croakers, a couple sting rays, and a TON of Dogfish.
I’ve tried fishing in the bay and ICWW (usually putting in at Buck Hall), with a cork and on the bottom, and with several baits (dead shrimp, dead finger mullet, and live mud minnows).
Anybody have any tips to share? Thanks.
Best advice I can give you is keep it up. You are doing the right thing by varying your locations, bait, etc…
I would recommend keeping a log detailing each trip. You may think you remember all the conditions, results (or lack of), baits used, etc but you really don’t. It all starts to run together and it makes it hard to determine what to use in similar situations.
Also, and this is probably the hardest thing i had to learn, don’t judge the “success” of these early trips by the number of fish over the rail. Anything that you learn or experience is the product of these first trips.
Lots of good info and advice is available on here. Read through a bunch of it. Here is a discussion that details some fish and bait habits that have been useful to me in targeting fish recently.
http://old.charlestonfishing.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=147267
Good luck
quote:
Originally posted by Bolbie
…the harbor was slick as an eel pecker.
Somedays are just like that especially during the “dog days” of summer.I’m still learning too, I hope I always will be. I was fortunate to have a father that took me on the salt regularly growing up. But, he constrained himself to a few good methods and tactics regardless of conditions. Sometimes we were “lucky” and sometimes we weren’t. We had great times on the water together but I’m still trying to learn enough about these fish and the methods of catching them to remove “luck” from the equation.
You’ll hear the same advice over and over again for good reason: moving water, creek mouths, structure, contour changes, chase the bait, etc. Some people just seem to have a “feel” for it that has always baffled me but I’m coming to think those folks just have a good ability to mentally catalogue previous conditions with what worked and what didn’t and they apply those experiences. Study everything you can about the habits of these fish we’re chasing. I think the SCDNR publications of by Charles Milner are an excellent read. Here’s the PDF on redfish: http://www.saltwaterfishing.sc.gov/pdf/reddrum.pdf
By in large most of the techniques are not much different from what you’d do bass fishing excepting that the changing tidal conditions will play a much bigger role on fish movement and feeding.
I like what ayejoe1017 said, focus on learning something each trip.
16’ High Tide Flats (Green) w/Yamaha 90
Wilderness Ride 135
Wilderness Tarpon 120
As someone who just started fishing salt water last year about this time i can echo what the posts above say. I live a few hours away and have been able to get out fishing 20 or so times in the last 13 or 14 months and many of those times I’ve been skunked…or practically skunked (i.e. stingray and a toadfish or something like that) I had one or two good days when I’d get into some redfish/trout and it didn’t seem to matter what I was casting…and then most days when I’ve gone to every spot I know of and thrown out everything and gotten nothing.
I hadn’t caught a redfish bigger than 21 inches until 3-4 weeks ago when I caught the fish in my avatar…so persistence pays off.
In general, live bait seems to work best for me. Frozen finger mullet haven’t yield much of anything for me and frozen shrimp only get me whiting and black sea bass.
207 CC SeaHunt
Yamaha 150