Chumming in one form or another has been one of the most basic and trusted methods of veteran inshore anglers for generations. It is a deadly way to coax fish from deep to extremely shallow water, and a little olfactory incentive might just get that fish already on the scene to eat like there’s no tomorrow. So whether you want to take the edge off of wary bonefish in a foot of water, get a school of inlet tarpon to rise off the bottom of a deep inlet, or bring a school of mackerel to your transom, chumming is the answer.
Flats anglers routinely stake out and chum for bonefish.
Inshore chumming elicits all kinds of reactions among inshore anglers. Purists consider it cheating, a lazy approach, and even something worse, particularly when it comes to doling out live baitfish, a standard bluewater method. Others argue that you gotta do what you gotta do to catch fish. Make your own judgements. This debate will go on forever.
Chumming can take many forms, and it works on almost all gamefish. For example, one of the surest ways of catching sheepshead is one I learned from my old friend, 85-year-old Art Ginn, of Palatka, Florida. While fishing with Art around bridge pilings one day in an old 14-foot wooden skiff, he broke out a garden hoe with which he scraped off barnacles and oysters clinging to the bridge. He wasn’t dainty or surgical in removing them—he simply crushed them with the flat side of the blade, and then scraped them off and into the water. “Won’t be long before sheepshead will show here, and we’ll catch plenty for lunch,” he said slyly. He was right, of course, and we caught black drum and redfish soaking fiddler crabs around that bridge, too. No doubt the chumming started the bite from all species present that day. Later, Art used the hoe to fill a plastic bucket with bridge barnacles and oysters, then crushed the shellfish with the hoe blade. He anchored our skiff on a sunken oyster bed near an inlet mouth, tossed over some of the shellfish chum, and shortly we were catching sheepshead on baits pitched just downcurrent.
While chumming is sure to improve most inshore fishing in most places, it can’t produce fish where there are none. So the most successful chummers employ the tactic in the most likely places. Shell bars, grassflats, jetties, inshore cuts and channels, mangrove and grassy points, docks and rocks, ledge dropoffs and similar fishy locations are prime places for chumming. But getting scent into the water is only half the battle. It’s also paramount to anchor your boat in such a way that you can present baited hooks or lures correctly to the fish you attract. For example, one summer I fished with well-known Louisiana guide Terry Shaughnessy just offshore in the Gulf of Mexico near his homeport of Lake Calcasieu, Louisiana. The place is noted for seatrout and redfish, but Terry was onto a big migration of cobia that were holding in as little as 15 feet of water around nearshore oil and gas platforms. The rigs were small, but the cobia were big, and they knew how to use platform legs to sever fishing line with ease.
Terry’s solution to catching the 20- to 50-pounders was to drop anchor well upcurrent of the structure, then let out enough anchor line so that we were a long cast from the rig. But he never cast. He just chummed with fresh-cut menhaden. In clear water it was easy to see several big cobes pick up the chum scent and wander out from the rig toward our boat. Once the fish were feeding in the chumline, he used the anchor line to pull the boat 10 yards farther away from the rig, chumming as he went. Once we felt we had pulled the fish far enough from the barnacle-encrusted pilings, we would cast into the chumline, hook a cobia, and muscle it to the boat. Anchoring and chumming any closer to that platform would have resulted in fired-up fish, but we would have likely lost every one we hooked.
