“The Most Exciting Fishing on Gulf Coast”
What is your favorite way to catch a fish? Is it popping a cork for schooling trout or topwater for big yellow mouths? Maybe it’s tossing spinner baits and big reds cruising a shoreline or even jigging deep water passes for whatever bites. Well if your answer isn’t sight fishing for red fish than that’s probably because you never experienced it. Sight fishing for reds is no doubt the most exhilarating fishing experience our coastal waters have to offer. It’s a combination between hunting and fishing. You get the experience of actually stalking a fish rather than casting and hoping for a bite.
The key to sight fishing is sunlight and clean water. Grass typically is the key for clean water. Many different eco systems provide different types of grass but grass is the key to filtering out clean water which is essentially to being able to see a red fish swimming. Also try and focus on sunny days when trying to sight fish reds. When a big cloud passes in front of the sun it’s like a light switch being turned to off and dark in a room. Also elevate yourself in your boat. You want to get high in your boat where your eyes can cut into the water. Build a stand or use a very sturdy ice chest on the bow of the boat as it will help you see much better into the water. Also always keep the sun at your back. You can not see into the water and into the sun at the same time, but when the sun is at your back you can see everything. Types of lures to through can very greatly. We like to throw the Matrix Craw a lot. Yes it’s a crawfish built for bass, but red fish love it. Craws are great in very grassy situations as you can rig them weedless and swam over the grass perfectly. Simply put your trolling motor at a nice cruising speed and keep you poles locked and loaded. What’s great about sight fishing is that you may catch a limit of reds and only made 15 cast all day. There isn’t a need to make 500 cast a morning when sight fishing. We call them pumpkins as they get golden bronze when floating over certain grass types. They stick out like a sore thumb. Now when we sight fish over sandy banks the reds are harder to see and are more silver. The key is to see the red before he sees you. If you make a good cast in front of an unsuspicious fish you hook up ratio is close to 90 percent.
Now when you find the mother load of red fish in a shallow pond or on a clean shoreline in a bay it is a beautiful sight. Schools can get up to hundred fish balled up in a thirty foot radius cruising around looking to massacre anything that gets in their way. Also one of the most beautiful sights in all of fishing is coming onto a shallow flat early on a slick calm morning and seeing red tails popping up all over the flat. Yes that’s right, red fish are known to lift their tails completely out of the water while scurrying up food out of the mud. So for those who have caught many reds in a certain shallow area try this technique and see just how efficient and exciting this style of fishing is.