An influx of flounder has them the best they have been in five years.    Early yet, they should continue to flood in.   The closure of the regular inshore species, flounder, pompano, snapper and sheepshead provide fish to take back to the house.   Flounder are notorious for living over sand bottom, usually next to something else.     Rocks, seagrass.    They are caught easily with lures.    I use a 1/8-ounce jighead and a five inch jerkbait style plastic tail.    Live bait options, if you have access to tiger minnows those are unbeatable live baits for flounder.   Use a castnet to catch them.   They stay alive easily and can catch multiple flounder on a single minnow.   

The lures, I use clear gold a lot of the time but they will eat any color you put in front of them.    The theme with flounder is “slow”.   Bump lures on the bottom at a painfully slow speed.    Not a particularly sporty fight, they are indeed good for dinners.   With tiger minnows, add enough split shots to get them to the bottom and keep them there.    Flounder have hard mouths.   A lot of flounder that we catch are holding onto the lure but aren’t really hooked.    You will lose some.     Getting a net under them captures some of these flounder that will drop the lure.      Sometimes they are aggressive.   Sometimes they are fickle but can still be caught.    Minimum size for harvest is 12 inches.   It is a rule I have proposed be changed for many years.    I don’t keep them unless they are 14 inches long.    You can keep ten flounder.    There is no maximum size limit.    It is not unusual to catch a flounder over 20 inches if you are into a school of them.   You can cook them to your own desire, unlike other species that need to be done in a specific way.    

Neil Taylor
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