Happy New Year!! The Christmas bite has been exceptional. Continuing to fish hard through a challenging year has led to happy and healthy fish.
Speckled Trout have not been as consistent as in past years. However, my anglers are finding pockets of big fish in troughs and deeper pockets around shallow grass flats. When we find a pocket of fish, they are more than willing to eat. There just seems to be less pockets of fish than in the past. Releasing fish in the slot and handling big fish with care will help this population replenish after a tough year. When boating a speckled trout, ALWAYS wet your hands to avoid peeling slime off the fish. If you plan on releasing the fish and don't need a picture, it's even better to just pull the hook at the side of the boat and send the fish on its way. Less handling and less time out of the water leads a much better chance for the fish to live.
The redfish bite has been really good with fish being more than willing to cooperate. Fish in the northern areas of my territory have been cruising across flats and into creeks and pockets as water pushes in on higher tides. Look for fish tailing or sitting laid up in potholes on the lower half of the tide cycle. Tailing fish can be challenging and super skittish this time of year. Put a small crab pattern that sinks quickly on the nose of the fish, move it as slow as possible and hope for a happy fish. Placing a shrimp or small pinfish pattern in front of cruising fish and moving it away from the fish will often trigger a strike. Power fishing topwater plugs, soft plastics, and gold spoons have all been producing redfish on days where there is little visibility.
While I haven't had the opportunity to fish them much. Tripletail have been cooperative on crab trap floats offshore. The bigger fish seem to be holding a little deeper than 10 feet. It's always worth checking floating debris and crab trap lines that are on your way to the next destination. Tripletail provide a really cool opportunity that poses a little different challenge to anglers when the wind lays down. The snook bite in the rivers has also been decent inside the rivers. Trolling plugs, large swimbaits, and jigs are the ticket for hooking up to a river snook. Fishing a couple days after a warmup will sometimes provide opportunities to sight fish snook and jacks in a narrow river. Fish will ride high in the water column and throw a head wake that make locating them fairly easy. These fish will put up a fight and provide quite a bit of chaos for anglers that feed them.
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