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Putting together a successful day on the water will greatly depend on your ability to solve the puzzle before you. Your first moves should take place at home, long before the trip starts.
Any successful fishing trip begins with good basic preparation like having a working knowledge of tides, tide charts, moon phases and how local weather can affect tidal predictions. Along with how tidal flow, weather and season affects different species, movements and location.
Often anglers will report poor fishing in a normally dependable location, simply because they were there on the wrong tide phase. If they had been there three hours earlier, they would have had a much different outcome.
Many old salts divide the tide into three separate stages as in low incoming or beginning of the tide, the flood stage, and finally, dead high tide.
If my goal is to find tailing redfish on the flats, I’m looking to be on the water during a low, or low incoming tide. Obviously with less water, the fish, especially shallow feeding redfish, bonefish and permit, are more visible on the flats, or concentrated in select locations. If you’re new to the area, first spend some time scouting your new fishing grounds during winter’s negative or ultra-low tides looking for troughs, cuts, depressions, ditches and holes that might hold fish.
The second phase of the tide floods the flats and provides the most water movement, as well as bait movement. Like humans, fish are lazy or, to put it more kindly, we all like to conserve energy, so ambush specialists like snook use available cover to hide behind out of the tide’s heaviest flow to conserve energy, only dashing out to grab a passing meal, and then quickly returning. When fishing cover like logs or docks, and before making your first cast, try to first envision where the moving tide has positioned the fish to feed. Knowing that top predator fish, like snook, face into the current to feed, take the time to position our boat so the first cast seems natural, with the lure brought to the fish, with the flow. Casting behind a pod of snook, attacking them from behind with your lure, will often scatter them. Set up for success by first properly positioning your boat before making that first cast.
Remember with that a wise old snook that can name every lure in your tackle box and is hiding behind that log ahead, you might only get one shot. Stack the odds in your favor and make that fist cast count by having your cast and retrieve come from the right direction.
The final phase, dead high tide, finds the fish spread far and wide, as well as far back and under the cover. Typically the feeding then stops or slows considerably until the next tide cycle begins.
Having lures or flies to chase the fish while they’re accessible during the early part of the tide and also having bait aboard to draw them out from under the cover with scent during the flood stage is all part of good preparation for the day’s outing.
Stronger water movement days usually provide the best fishing success. If your tide chart shows a dead low tide at say 7 a.m., with a slow, all day incoming tide becoming dead high at 7 p.m. that evening, it might be a good day to stay home and do that much needed boat maintenance that you’ve been putting off. On the other hand, if it’s low at say 7 a.m. and high at 12:30 p.m., that means lots of water and bait movement, and typically much better fishing.
You’ve studied the tide chart and picked the perfect tide and weather day. Did you look at last night’s moon phase? If you had a bright full moon last night, you might find today’s inshore fishing to be slow even with perfect tide and weather conditions.
Capt. George Tunison is a Cape Coral resident fishing guide. Contact him at 239-282-9434 or captgeorget3@aol.com.