2/7/08
Take advantage of great mid-winter speckled trout fishing
By Terry Madewell

Terry Madewell Photo

You can easily land a limit of saltwater trout by utilizing a combination of casting jigs, using live bait and trolling.

While we do have to make a short drive to get to the coast, we’re really not that far. During this time of the year when it’s so cold and fishing on freshwater lakes slows, as well as in mid-summer when it is so hot, there are some good reasons to fish the inshore saltwater areas. I like to make at least one or two trips to the coast every winter to get in on the good shallow water fishing in the inshore areas.

Right now, there are two good reasons to go to the coast, the spotted sea trout and the spot tail bass, also known as redfish. Action on both species has been good, but the trout action has actually been very good for many anglers. Some are catching fish by casting jigs, many are using live bait and others are trolling, but regardless of the favored technique, good catches of trout are being made all along the South Carolina coast.

Trout are an exciting species of saltwater to fish for and catch. As table fare, they’re sensational. You can fry tem, bake them or use them in various other ways. I’ve yet to find a way to eat sea trout that I didn’t like.

On a recent trip, we actually did a little of all the above and caught fish on each method, casting, live bait and trolling.

I met my buddies well before daylight. Sometimes bait is easy to catch, sometimes not. This time we brought some store bought mud minnows for bait and that worked out well. We were fishing near Charleston, close enough where you could see the larger buildings as the sun began to slip over the horizon.

Once it was light enough to see and motor safely, we started down the Inter-coastal Waterway toward a couple of their favored trout-fishing creeks. The creeks were near a major inlet into the ocean, just to the north of Charleston.

We were fishing a stretch of bank that had several small creeks emptying into it. The tide was dropping and had just about dropped out of the grass, a good time to be fishing for trout or redfish.

It didn’t take long for one of the guys to hook a trout. There’s a 13-inch minimum size limit and there was no need to measure the first couple he caught. They were in the 15-inch-plus class. I noted he was bumping the bottom with his jig slower than I was and that was the key to the bite. I slowed down and began hooking up trout.

The fishing technique they used is a lot like our freshwater largemouth bass fishing with plastic worms. We were using was a DOA shrimp imitation lure. Essentially, it’s similar to a jig and grub (which also works, but the shrimp design seems to work best in saltwater).

The best method was to cast the lure to the edge of the shoreline and slowly, very slowly, bump the jig along the bottom as we worked it back in. As the outgoing tide carried the lure down the creek, we didn’t have to reel much line, just keep a tight line and bump the lure along the bottom. Once the lure got well downstream and started to swing toward the middle of the creek and off the bottom, we’d reel in and cast again.

When a trout engulfed the jig we’d feel a good thump, set the hook and the battle was on.

Later on, the bite slowed and we moved to another creek with a big bend. We anchored and used live bait about a foot below a two-inch cork. We’d cast to the edge lines and let it drift around the corner with the current. Every few minutes one of us would hook up with a nice trout. It was a good way to have time to enjoy a cup of coffee; it was a cold morning.

The tide was beginning to get low now, so the best fishing was generally away from the bank, out in the middle of the creek for the most part. This was the time one of the guys suggested we slow troll jigs and grubs down the middle of the creek.

There were a couple of deeper holes in the one-half mile section of creek we fish and those areas seemed to be the hotspots for the trout.

One of the guys did explain that often when the water gets near low tide, most fishermen would give up on the trout. But by working the middle of the smaller creeks, you can still find plenty of fish willing to bite.

That was certainly the case with us. While you can catch trout extremely well on the rising tide, especially until the water gets back in the grass and the trout then scatter into the shallows it seems, we had planned our trip for the dropping tide only.

If you’re looking for some quality fishing right now, using light tackle for some great eating fish, you should give this a try. Any of these three methods will produce good results and if you combine them on an as-needed basis, you indeed have a trout-catching triple threat.