ARKANSAS SPORTSMAN

Key to catching speckled trout is finding spots

Catching speckled sea trout and tripletail is easy. Finding them is the hard part.

That’s different from freshwater fishing, which is a lot more technical. You can be around largemouth bass, stripers and catfish on Arkansas lakes or rivers, but you never know if they’ll bite. Boat positioning is important, as is bait presentation, time of day, wind, sunlight and current. You don’t know why a fish didn’t bite any of the first 20 casts, and you don’t know why it finally bit the 21st.

If you find speckled trout, you’ll catch them, but the ocean is a mighty big place for fish to get lost.

Birds are key. Gulls, terns and pelicans follow baitfish and shrimp, as do trout and redfish. When you see a flock of gulls plunge into the water, you can count on catching trout. Redfish aren’t as numerous or as aggressive, so they’re more ofa bonus. They move with the bait, so you have to follow them. As long as something doesn’t happen to disperse the school, such as another boat running through it, the bite can last for an hour or more.

Of course, sharks follow trout, redfish and ladyfish. It was a real thrill Wednesday when a big blacktip shark leaped from the water to attack a trout on my line. It missed. They usually don’t.

Five of us, including my son Matthew, our guide Sonny Schindler, Tommy Akin and Mike Jones, caught 130 keeper trout Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as scores of sub-legal trout. We caught almost all of them with Strike King Redfish Magic swimbaits on ½-ounce lead jig heads.

Trout hit all colors, but they seemed to prefer the pumpkinseed/red flake. After that, pearl/chartreuse was best, followed by pearl/rose. We threw them on tandem rigs and often caught two at a time. With an umbrella rig, it would be possible to catch four and maybe five at a time. The Redfish Magic is a tough, durable bait. It requires a barbed jig head.

An interesting thing about trout, Schindler said, is that you must throw baits constantly to keep the bite going. He ran from angler to angler unhooking and boxing our fish to avoid delays. Otherwise, he said, the fish could get disinterested and scatter. As long as they’re in a feeding frenzy, it can go indefinitely until sharks or dolphins show up.

Our gear wasn’t fancy. We used medium-action spinning rods and Okuma and Shimano spinning reels.

Tripletails are hard to catch on artificial bait, but they won’t ignore a live shrimp under a popping cork. You look for them around any kind of floating structure, like crab pot buoys.They face into the current, so toss the rig a few feet in front of them and slowly reel it back. They don’t fight long, but they fight hard, kind of like an Ozark bass.

Schindler said you have to handle tripletails carefully because they have three ways to hurt you. First, they have sharp gill rakers over their gill plates. They have spines on their pectoral fins, like catfish, and they have sharp spikes on their dorsal fins.

The bigger fight is over who keeps a tripletail. They are quite tasty, and the angler who catches it will have to fend off rivals. If it’s a big one, you can always share.

Sports, Pages 26 on 06/30/2013

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