My home water is the Indian River Lagoon between Stuart and Vero Beach. That’s many, many miles of shoreline on the east and west banks, holding snook, reds, trout, tarpon in season, and a mix of flounder, sheepshead, black drum and others. These species differ somewhat in their behavior, and must be fished differently at times. Seatrout are not as structure-oriented as redfish and snook; so those you find along shorelines will lay up in open water, possibly orienting to grass edges that abut clean bottom, and to potholes. Both are good places to ambush bait, and provide concealment. For that reason, it’s best to fan-cast a shoreline flat for trout before moving in tighter to the trees where you’d expect to find snook and reds. In winter, big solitary trout hang over dark-colored mud bottom—it heats up quicker and holds the sun’s warmth better than the sandy and shelly bottom trout frequent in the warmer months.
Angler gains the upper hand on a mangrove-hugging redfish.
During a recent flats fishing trip near Jacksonville, Florida, I was tossing a brightly colored jerkbait up into the grass and working it back toward an oyster bar. After doing this for most of a fishless morning, my guide decided to change tactics and target flounder with finger mullet over mud bottom bordering spartina grass. After catching a few nice flounder, I suggested trying to get one to eat a jerkbait.
“You’ll never get a flounder on that bait unless it has some weight, or is pinned to a jighead to get it to the bottom,” my guide told me.
And he was right. I never did catch a flounder, but I did catch three huge trout that wanted nothing to do with our flounder baits. I tried the same tactic in the marsh at St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, with similar luck, although the trout were smaller and there were a few rat reds in the mix.
Some of the fishiest shorelines are shallow sand banks and shoals on the edges of channels or canals. I recently fished out of Charleston, South Carolina, with local guide Ben Alderman, who spent the day bouncing from one bend in the Intracoastal Waterway to the next. As Alderman explained it, the current shoals up the inside of the bends and reds gang up on those shallows to root for shrimp, and pick off mullet. I would have focused my energy on the obvious oyster bars and areas where tide pools ran into the Waterway, yet we found school after school of hungry reds pushing water on these shallow shorelines.
But don’t assume that a shoreline has to be super-shallow to hold species that you normally associate with shallow water. Southwest Florida guides target snook and redfish by casting live pilchards into deep holes along shorelines of mangrove islands. Snook and redfish get up under the trees where they can ambush baitfish moving with the tidal current, so the common tactic is to fire a bait to the mangroves just upcurrent of the deeper water, and let the tide sweep the bait to the waiting predators. Keep in mind that fish along deeper shorelines aren’t as spooky as those that lurk in the shallows.
I’m a big proponent of making the longest cast possible at all times, to avoid getting too close to fish and alarming them. You’ll know when trout or snook get on edge because they move slowly away from the boat, always keeping some distance.
In water clear enough for sight fishing, you have the advantage of knowing which direction the fish is facing and where to make the cast, but in most cases being that close to a fish also allows that fish (sometimes many fish) to see your movements and hear any commotion. Any reaction to an angler’s movement before the cast is a sure sign the fish is on its guard, and not likely to feed.
