From the category archives:
Here are a couple of thoughts to ponder when the fish are not biting. They call it “fishing not catching,” therefore becoming a better catcher means research, study, and practice…“there are no free rides.” Secondly, temperature has a direct influence on the comfort level of fish and “Happy Fish…Make Happy Anglers.”
Therefore, understanding water temperature is perhaps the single most significant matter between fishing and catching. Appreciation of temperature and its affect on fish often makes your angling life simpler.
Fish are cold-blooded or presumed cold-blooded. Then again, like most creatures they do produce limited forms of metabolic heat derived from oxidation or burning of food. This might prompt the question; if they produce heat why are they cold-blooded? Cold-blooded simply means dependent on surrounding environments as there is no way of controlling the body’s temperature.
To understand why fish feel cold to the touch means knowing how their circulatory system operates. This very simple system circulates blood through a two-chamber, single pump heart which carries blood and oxygen to and from the gills. Since the gills are open to external temperatures and considering that blood passed through them makes it easy to grasp the cold-blooded concept. Any heat whether metabolic or otherwise rapidly dissipates as it enters and leaves the gills.
Although we consider all fish cold-blooded there are some exceptions. Tuna, billfish, and some sharks use a system of parallel blood vessels called “countercurrent heat exchange.” With this system the veins run close together and allow the transfer of heat from one to the other. In other words, veins carrying warm blood to the gills transfers’ heat to veins returning with cool blood. This system operates with remarkable efficiency allowing otherwise lost heat to remain within the body.
Tuna are a prime example of “countercurrent heat exchange” and it’s used so effectively you could refer to them as warm-blooded. Tuna have large muscles that require heat to function effectively. With a semi-constant body temperature their muscles contract faster which increases speed; enabling them to catch food, and escape danger.
Bodily functions in cold-blooded fish are temperature dependent and being unable to control that temperature any sudden changes can affect their appetite, heart rate and respiration. The only alternative to controlling an unbearable water temperature means they must move to more comfortable surroundings.
Temperatures typically fluctuate slowly, allowing fish the opportunity to gradually adapt to changing water temperatures. However, severe cold fronts often force rapid drops thereby initiating uncomfortable and stressful conditions. Humans are no exception and uncomfortable circumstances often influence our activities or patterns of behavior. Subsequently when fish become comfortable they may instinctively move from a comfort zone to feed, provided they can return. On the other hand when they become uncomfortable, their patterns may also change transitioning them into a survival mode, becoming lethargic or not feeding; often moving to more tolerable temperatures until acclimatized. Clearly, fish are appreciably in touch with their surrounding especially temperature. In addition, the more you study their preferences, the more success you enjoy.
The metabolic processes increase as water warms and decreases as it cools. A 10 to 18 degree rise in water temperature causes metabolic rates to double often affecting feeding and digestion. However, extremes on either side can be devastating since water that are to cold or hot have a direct correlation to oxygen levels. In most cases, cold water slows them down and warm water speeds them up but only to a point. Rapidly fluctuating water temperatures frequently impair breathing consequently; oxygen rich waters with steady temperatures are more comfortable.
Because temperature affects everything most creatures including humans have comfort ranges. Comfort ranges for some Florida fish are: Snook 70-86, Redfish 56-84, Cobia 68-86. King Mackerel 70-75, Spanish Mackerel 67+, Pompano 70-86, Spotted Seatrout 65-75, Tarpon 74-88 These temperature ranges are only a guide and variations one-way or the other are expected.
Improving catch ratios is often the discussion among anglers but until you become skilled at reading the water; along with understanding temperature, habitats, and how each affects behavior patterns; pretty much all it is… just discussion.
Highly regarded lines of attack to becoming a better catcher are research and understanding. Remember, education should consist of a desire for knowledge raising an individual to a higher level of conscious comprehension.
What’s the Temperature Tip: Today’s electronic packages usually include provisions to monitor horizontal surface and often vertical temperature readings. Understandably, many anglers cannot afford these pricey tools. Here is an easy solution if you are not equipped with electronics, a simple everyday thermometer will suffice simply attach it to a string or secure it inside your live well.
Capt. Woody Gore 813-477-3814 www.captainwoodygore.com
Inshore fishing has grown in popularity over the last few decades bringing throngs of new anglers to the sport; unfortunately a by-product of this popularity is poor conduct. Pioneer inshore greats like Bill Curtis, Joe Brooks, and my good friend Stu Apte were looked at as gentlemen in this sport, who pitted their significant skills and light tackle against formidable shallow water quarry all the while displaying a great deal of respect for their fellow anglers. Back then and even through most of my fishing career there has always been certain customs and etiquettes that anglers abided by when sharing the water… ensuring good experiences for all. Today, there are a lot more anglers fishing the shallows and you would think that common sense and respect would play an even larger role but quite the contrary is happening now!
In the beginning, inshore fishing or flats fishing had etiquette similar to the sport of golf; honor and respect for others and the environment were exhibited by all anglers making for many positive experiences and thus attracted many newcomers to our sport. For the sake of comparison, let’s match up a few similarities between golf and shallow water etiquette. In golf, you wouldn’t drive a ball up onto a green until the party ahead of you putted out and left the green. In shallow water fishing it’s not a good practice to ease up on fellow anglers (the bent rod pattern) working a school of fish or a piece of structure to get a cast in on their fish or spot unless you’re invited! This bent rod scenario is maybe the biggest problem in the sport today… try to find your own fish it’s part of the mystique that got you into the sport in the first place. Also, in golf you wouldn’t walk onto another golfer’s putting line on the green, it’s a definite lack of respect and sportsmanship. The same applies when fishing the flats… you never cut off another angler’s water who is already working a flat or mangrove shoreline to get in front of him. The right thing to do is to fall in behind him and fish his used water or better yet find another area altogether! And here’s a final comparison between golf and inshore fishing, in golf you wouldn’t drive your golf cart onto the manicured fairways and greens (you would be asked to leave)… carts should stay on the cart path. Just as you shouldn’t run your boat over shallow flats while others are trying to fish… use the channels and deeper areas to run your boat then ease up onto shallow fishing areas either by trolling motor or push pole, give other anglers plenty of room! All of these comparisons are obvious common sense scenarios yet we still we see too many lack of etiquette situations occurring every day. We must stop ourselves and demonstrate better sportsmanship toward our fellow anglers or the poor behavior that exists now will perpetuate to our younger anglers and eventually effect the survival of our sport.
Below are a few “Rules of Thumb” to follow while enjoying flats fishing:
Again it’s up to all of us to be good stewards of our light tackle sport and to lead by example so that we’ll all enjoy better fishing for years to come!
Visit www.flatsclass.com for more great info!
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C. A. Richardson
I get this question quite frequently from my charter clients who charter me on their home waters. “How can I be more successful finding and catching fish on a consistent basis?” They don’t often like my answer. “You have to sacrifice some of your fishing trips.” They usually look at me funny and then ask me exactly what you’re thinking right now. “What the heck does that mean?” Well, I’ll tell you.
If you want to catch more fish on a more consistent basis, here is what I think you could do that would help tremendously. Forget about catching fish for a year. That’s right. Give up on actually catching fish for a year. Instead, you need to build a portfolio of places that your target fish frequent and you need to know what time of year and what part of the tide that they hang out there. How do we build the “portfolio”?
You need a nautical chart, a notebook, a trolling motor and a desire to learn. You also have to be able to give up your desire for instant gratification. If today is the first day of building your portfolio, you have to let go of the desire to catch fish today so that you’ll be more successful for the rest of your life.
“But I don’t have time for that! I only get to fish a few days a month!” Ok, quit reading this and go about the rest of your fishing life with the same results you’ve had in the past. If that’s working for you, great! If you want to be consistently more successful, read on.
If you’re still reading this, understand that we’re working off of the premise that finding fish is a prerequisite to catching them. This article covers the “finding part”. We’ll cover the “catching part” in a later article.
1.) Get out your shiny new waterproof nautical chart the night before your first portfolio building trip. Pick a stretch of shoreline that you will cover the next day day. With my setup, I figure I can cover 3-5 miles of shoreline on the trolling motor.Your setup may be different, just try to cover as much shoreline as possible.
2.) Get your notebook out and name the stretch of shoreline that you’ll be covering the next day on a page that you will dedicate to that stretch of shoreline.
3.) Go to bed.
4.) Wake up and go “fishing” not “catching”. The object here is to locate fish. Head to your predetermined stretch of shoreline and drop the trolling motor. You’re going to be using it the rest of the day. For finding redfish and snook, get as close to the shoreline as you can and troll your stretch of shoreline until your batteries are dead. Be conscious of the fact that you are looking for fish. You are not looking to catch fish. If you happen on some fish and you can get a few casts on them before spooking them, great. But don’t spend this time concerned with results. Spend this time learning.
5.) Every time you find a few fish, make a note in your notebook about where you found them, roughly how many of them were there (terms like a “few” or a “lot” will suffice), what the tide stage was, what the weather was like and don’t forget to write down the date.
6.) Move on. Yeah you found some fish but don’t forget we’re trying to learn as much as we can with each portfolio building trip. Keep moving. Don’t worry if you troll right over top of the fish or spook them. Keep in mind that the real value in what you are doing is finding the fish and you aren’t going to do that by being stealthy and staying off of the shoreline.
7.) At the end of the day, open your notebook and look over what you’ve found. The more you study your book, the more info you’ll retain years down the road. As time goes on and your portfolio contains more and more info, you’ll also start to see patterns. For example, one day, on any given day, you’ll be able to get on the water and think… “I remember that this time last year on this tide, there were fish at ‘XYZ’ spot.” Does that guarantee that there will be fish there that day. No, but now you don’t just have one spot to hit on those conditions. You have a whole portfolio of spots to hit on those conditions and I guarantee you your odds of success will go way up.
You should be able to cover just about every inch of your home waters in 10-20 trips. Time to go “catching” right? Nope, go back and do it again. Only this time, you’ll be covering these spots at a different time of year, hopefully at different tides and with different weather conditions. Keep doing this until you feel like you have a solid grasp of your area during all times of year, during each tide stage and make note of the weather.
You can keep going back to your same old spots if you want to and you can keep wondering why some days are good there and some days aren’t. Or, you can build a “portfolio” fishing knowledge and be consistently more successful for a lifetime. It’s just going to take some sacrifice.
I haven’t been fishing redfish tournaments very seriously for a couple of years now. Although I love fishing them, I just haven’t had time to participate. But the other day, a few of my friends had just gotten back from a big Redfish Cup event and the topic of conversation was not how to win a tournament, but how to lose one. If you can avoid doing some of these things, you’re bound to increase your odds of finishing in the money.
Here are some of the surefire ways to lose a redfish tournament.
When prefishing, it’s easy to get fixated on one group of fish or one spot that has been producing. Don’t get me wrong, spending a day at one spot or with one school of fish isn’t necessarily a bad idea. This can help you be certain the fish are the right size, learn what lures they’ll eat best and figure out where the fish go when the tides and conditions change. However, once you feel like you’ve got a good bead on how the fish are moving around, behaving and what they are eating, move on and find more fish. I’ll share my personal painful learning experience as to why.
Several years ago, I was preparing for an FLW Redfish tournament in Mosquito Lagoon. I planned on prefishing for 7 days. Turns out that I didn’t really do that much fishing at all. The second spot I checked, on the first day of prefishing, was loaded with about 200 perfect redfish. The first cast produced a 26.5″ 7.5lb red. They all looked the same size so I just sat there and watched them for the rest of the afternoon to see where they would go. They stayed put. The next day, I brought my tournament partner out with me to let him take a look at them. As we quietly trolled up to the spot, I reached back to sling a jig in the direction of the fish and said with a grin, “Watch this.” I twitched the jig twice and hooked up. A nice 26.5″ 7.5lb redfish came boat-side and I said to my partner, “They’re all like this and they’re staying right here”.
We decided that we didn’t want anyone else stumbling onto these fish so our plan was to camp out on them until the tournament started later in the week. We figured that if we just babysat the fish that nobody would come close enough to see what we were on. We knew that if other anglers saw us sitting there for a few days that they would know that we were on something but we were betting that nobody would go there on day one of the tournament unless they had actually seen the fish for themselves.
The day before the tournament, we were sitting there reading books while babysitting our fish just like the two previous days, a boat ran by us within 100 yards and it seemed to spook the fish. These fish hadn’t moved in 7 days and now I am watching them get up and cross the flat. I could see them pushing a wake as they vanished into the horizon. I told my partner that this worried me and he said, “They’ll be back. They just got spooked by that boat.” Well, we sat there for another 2 hours and they did not come back. It started to rain and I decided that we better head in to prepare for the captain’s meeting.
All the way back to the hotel I worried that it was the rain that moved these fish and not the boat that ran close by us. I had a sick feeling in my stomach about it. The next morning my worst fears were realized. It took about 45 minutes to get to the spot that morning just to find out that the fish I had counted on so much had vanished. Who knows why those fish moved? Was it the rain the day before? Was it pressure from us sitting there for 7 days? It didn’t matter what the reason was. That wasn’t important. What was important was that we had spent the whole week sitting right there and we didn’t didn’t know where any other fish were. We put all our eggs in one basket and the basket was now empty. It was a sickening feeling and an expensive lesson to learn.
We ended up catching a few small fish during the tournament but we were so sick about the whole ordeal that we didn’t even bother to weigh them in. If you want a good game plan for losing a redfish tournament, then count on one spot to produce or one school of fish to be where you left them and you won’t often be disappointed.
Information you get from others at a tournament may more may not be given with ill intentions. Either way, putting your trust in information you get from others can be a costly mistake. Even if the information your are given, by someone else is given to you with the best of intentions, it’s just not good practice to bet your tournament on it. The person giving you this info doesn’t know the capabilities of your boat, they may not be good at explaining what they are trying to tell you and you just never know how good the info is because it’s second hand info.
I won’t mention names in this story because I worry that my friend might be embarrassed or that the people who gave the good intentioned info to him might think I’m speaking ill of them. But, a good friend of mine was having a hard time finding quality fish while prefishing for a big event this year. He had befriended another team during the year and he was telling them about his misfortune. Well, this good intentioned team decided that they could share the fish they were on and that my friend could just follow them to the spot. My friend mentioned that the water would be low tournament morning and asked if they thought he would be able to get his boat into the spot. The good intentioned team assured him that it would be shallow but there shouldn’t be any problem getting there. So, tournament morning comes up and off they go. It would be an hour’s ride to the spot and my friend was right on the tail of his benefactors. They got within sight of the bayou that they would be fishing when his boat bottomed out in the mud. They sat there for 4 hours waiting on the tide to come in. Leaving them with a very small amount of time to fish before they had to be back at the dock for weigh-in.
I have no doubt that the anglers who shared this info with my friend did so with good intentions, but they just didn’t really know the capabilities of my friends boat and that it couldn’t run in 4 inches of water like their tunnel hulled flat bottom boat could. Putting your faith in others and their information can cost you. My buddy may have not won that tournament anyway. He wasn’t on good fish anywhere else. But, I can tell you he would have had a better shot fishing just about anywhere than he had stuck in the mud for 4 hours on day one of that tournament.
I used to be a landlocked angler. Shoot, I bet most of us started out fishing off a dock, pier or shoreline. So the new law that’s been put in place has me a bit conflicted inside. The part of me that remembers being tethered to the shore for lack of a boat feels that land locked anglers shouldn’t have to pay for a license. But now that I’m older and wiser (older for sure) I see that any angler using the resource should have some financial responsibility for its upkeep and protection. I think the state has handled this well. The shore bound angler’s don’t have access to the whole resource so they shouldn’t have to pay the same amount for a license as us boaters.
Here’s a link to the FWC’s latest news release on the subject.
There may be no better way to present a bait to spooky redfish, or bass for that matter, than throwing a weightless soft plastic bait. Rigged with a weedless hook like the one that Slayer Inc. Lure Co. makes this weightless wonder a very versatile tool of the trade. Because of its obvious light weight, errors in casting are much easily forgiven. Accidentally place it to close to your prey and the lighter splashdown is less likely to make your fish turn and run. Combine the lighter weight with weedless properties and it can be fished in a variety of ways.
This bait can be fished slowly over any type of bottom without the fear of getting snagged on grass, rocks or oysters. It can be fished fast and erratically, even coming out of the water, to imitate a scared bait fish or shrimp as well. It can be skipped under docks and low hanging limbs. Other than deep water, there’s literally no place this deadly combination can’t go.
Next time you head out, fishing with lures, grab some weedless, weightless hooks and your favorite soft plastic bait and give it a shot. You might just get hooked on shedding weight.
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