Captain’s Corner: Ed Walker

The Tampa Bay Times

By Ed Walker

Although currently closed to harvest due to last years red tide. fishing for big spotted sea trout is a wintertime pastime for many inshore anglers.  Abundant and eager to grab an artificial lure, trout can be caught in many ways. One of the best methods for bigger fish is casting unweighted soft plastic lures in shallow water. Jerkbaits have just the right action to entice strikes without scaring the fish. In water less than 3 feet deep, you cannot effectively use a lead head jig, it will sink to the bottom and catch grass. Fast action lures like this will cause most skinny water specks to run away. A jerkbait rigged on a curved worm hook however, can be worked in a very subtle manner that the fish love.

The weight of the hook itself is all that is needed to keep the bait from floating but allow it to suspend between the surface and the top of the grass where most strikes occur.

We usually use lighter line. 8 to 10 pound test braid, to make very long casts and present your bait to the fish far from the boat, long before then sense your  presence. When selecting a direction to cast, try to cover as many sandy patches in the grass as possible. The fish are often sitting in these holes so the more you can cross, the better your chances. The best action to give the lure is a “twitch-twitch- pause” pattern. I even say it aloud when explaining it to my charter clients;  “twitch-twitch- pause”. More often than not, the bites come during the pause as the lure hovers, or slowly sinks.