Fishing still slow

Fishing still slow
Published: Wednesday, February 3, 2010 8:19 AM EST

I was at a meeting of the Saltwater Light Tackle Fishing Club recently where Don Willis (Custom Marine Fabrication of New Bern) was the guest speaker talking about new fishing tackle and gear he saw at the recent Henry?s Tackle show in Raleigh.

He showed us some cool stuff, and also made an observation that I think was right on. He said ?Berkley Gulp! and suspending baits has turned mediocre and poor trout fishermen to good trout fishermen.? Just think about it, you can almost catch anything on the Gulp! series of flavored baits and suspending hard plastics are killers of trout, drum and you name it.

These days there are other flavored baits out there, and all of them work extremely well, and you don?t need to be a genius to use them. You toss them out, you bring them in and viola, you catch fish. The suspending baits, like MirrOlure Catch 2000, or their 17 and 27-MR series are also equally deadly. You throw them out and let them sink, add a few twitches and during the pause, they are nailed by hungry, aggressive trout, especially in the winter.

There is some finesse with these baits. I particularly like to use the lightest jig head with the Gulps!, usually 1/8 or 1/16th ounce, or even better unweighted, fished with weedless or bass worm hooks.

These and other soft plastics are also excellent producers fished on the ultimate of suspending baits, the cork where you have total control of the movement and motion of the bait. If you fish these often you will quickly notice that most of the hits occur in the settling and drop down phase, when nothing is seemingly happening. So fish both the corked and uncorked slow and low and only twitch the baits from time to time.

Ditto with the suspenders, and I don?t mean the ones that hold up your pants. Cast, let the current drift the bait when possible, occasionally twitching the bait. Again in the ?sleep? phase is when you should expect the hit, bite or bump, so be ready or you may miss the fish. All this is well and good, but you also have to remember, if there are no fish around, it really doesn?t matter what bait you use, finessed or not.

This week was again a slow fishing week. There were few fish caught and very few fishermen out there to get any data on the comings and goings of our local winter species. Personally I landed a few specks in the creeks using some of the Matsuo soft plastics fished lowly and slowly on a cork. The ones I landed were feisty, but due to their body ?strawberries? I could tell that there were net survivors, so I released them back from whence they came.

Seeing that they had escaped such encounters of the net kind I wasn?t going to be the one to kill them. As usual, there the creeks were full of bait, mostly mullet and several times I stopped fishing for fear of hooking a aerial pelican on its decent or an unseen cormorant chasing a fish. The only other info I have is that there have been some trout some over five pounds, at the Cape Lookout Rock Jetty landed at night on MirrOlures along with the red drum.

Remember striper rumors? Well there is another rumor that there were some stripers at the Lookout Shoals. Personally I?ve got to see it to believe it, but if there is ever a nice day to get out there, It may be worth a trip.

Finally, this January ended with some of the coldest water temperatures in the many years that I?ve been collecting data. Normally the January average for the surf is in the low to mid 50s, but January 2010 had a surf average of 46.7 degrees and the sound averaged a frigid 44.1 degrees.

Obviously cold enough to kill some fish. By the way, Broad, Gayle?s, Spooner?s and Pelletier creeks all had ice on them Monday Morning. We?ll have to see what Groundhog Day and our own Sir Walter Wally says about spring!

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