Bigger trout are not necessarily loners. They typically school up with a half-dozen others.
Utilizing a combination of senses, seatrout use sound as a means of locating food until they can get close enough to see their prey and catch it. You can use sound to your advantage by using lures that splash, thrash, click or pop. Even something as simple as adding a small glass rattle to a rubber shrimp or jerkbait can make a big difference.
The same goes for the real deal. Pigfish, croakers and other baitfish that grunt literally “call” trout in to their locations. Once a trout locks into the sound, it’s just a matter of time before it finds what it’s after and takes the easy meal.
Certain floats on the market also make sounds that attract trout. Some rattle or click while others pop. Rattles work best with shrimp while baitfish are better deployed under popping corks. Both are designed to draw the trout into visual distance of the bait.
There’s an old adage among fishermen that goes, “Even elephants eat peanuts now and then.” But given a choice, an elephant is going to respond more favorably to something considerably more substantial that it doesn’t have to consume in large numbers to fill its belly, and a seatrout is no different. A trophy trout wants a substantial meal, and by offering larger lures or baits you can weed out the smaller fish that can’t consume a bait of that size, and thereby increase the number of strikes from large, adult seatrout.
In Florida, I do a lot of snook fishing, and in the spring and fall that means tossing big mullet around bridges and seawalls. For larger snook, a 10- to 14-inch mullet is the perfect-sized bait. But on a number of occasions I’ve had gator trout crush those big mullet. I recall one trout struggling for almost a minute to get a big mullet down. It ate the bait along a seawall in the middle of the day, and wallowed on the surface as it worked the big bait down its throat. That fish weighed just over 12 pounds, and is my biggest trout to date.
Food and comfort attract seatrout to any given area, and what’s good for one is usually attractive to others, so don’t expect big trout to be loners. Trophy trout are regularly encountered in small schools of three to seven fish, particularly during the winter months when they seek out the same type of terrain for warmth. The same holds true in spring and early summer when the fish gather to spawn in the deeper channels abutting shallow flats. Areas that have held big fish in the past will regularly produce similar results in the future given the same conditions. Remember that.
It’s up to you to figure out what brought the trout to any given location. If it’s the food, match the food source in size, shape and color. If it’s comfort, then fish the areas that seem to offer room service. And if it’s reproduction, then get ready for multiple strikes from big fish. Understand what attracts gator trout, and you’ll catch a lot more trophies from here on out.
