The St. Johns River and area lakes
The on-again, off-again weather patterns are keeping fish moving and fisherman on their toes. It's been hit-and-miss and run-and-gun kind of fishing with mixed bags of whatever you happen across. One guide on the St. Johns, for instance, reported a day's catch of 15 catfish, 20 bluegill, three largemouth bass and a hybrid striper.
The one constant has been finding speckled perch under docks - especially older docks in deeper water. And spider-riggers continue to catch limits slow-trolling or drifting deeper water with a dozen-plus rods out, covering lots of bottom.
The hybrid stripers are schooling up from Welaka down to Dunn's Creek. They love bad weather and cold water. These schools are constantly on the move and don't relate much to structure — other than sandbars which they use to help push baits schools to the top. As always, diving birds are the way to find these feeding schools.
Bass fishing is slow. One bass guide suggested fishing coves where the water temperatures are slightly warmer in order to find them. It's also about time for some bedding to begin, so shallower, warmer areas around cover will become an increasingly better bet.
The Intracoastal Waterway
This is the time of year when bluefish become a bane to a majority of anglers. They chomp up your live bait and cut off your leaders. But I was given a recipe a few years back for smoked bluefish - and it turned out to be delicious. The oily meat licks up the smoke and the other ingredients round out the flavor. If you're feeling adventurous, give this a try.
To one pound of smoked bluefish (your choice of wood but apple works well) add 8 ounces of cream cheese, a quarter cup of butter, and two ounces of cognac — more if it's been a rough day.
Puree this in a food processor, then and two tbsp of lemon juice, a half tsp of Worstershire sauce, three tbsp of chopped onion and pulse till combined. Add salt and fresh ground pepper to taste. Serve over chips or toasted bread. Keep cognac handy just in case.
The redfish are pushing back into the flats for warmth and are staging up in the backs of creeks where they become kind of a captive audience. The bugaboo seems to be you may run into a majority of undersized specimens either way.
Speckled seatrout have been tough to target just when they should not be. The black drum and sheepshead bites are very good with the better drum fishing occurring down around Matanzas Inlet. There are plenty of undersized specimens as well.
There are still some wayward pompano in the ICW. One guide caught four up by Guana.
The Atlantic
When the boats could get offshore between these fronts, the blackfin tuna bite remains pretty hot. Sailfish are still out there along with scattered mahi. The wahoo bite has been slow, but the waters off the Carolinas are getting cold and this should push big numbers of these fish south any day now.
These are tops in the minds of most offshore anglers. They run like a foul-hooked Maserati and offer thick filets of pure white meat that takes on the nuances of any and all spices you care to impart — or not.
There's no trolling going on out on the local reefs and wrecks but there have been red-hot catches of yellowmouth trout out there for those targeting them on the bottom.
Surf fishing is hit-and-miss with some good catches of whiting from time to time — with an occasional redfish of seatrout mixed in. The pompano have moved south of us and were getting hammered down off Ormond Beach early in the week. There are a few still here, but very few. The whiting down south are also what we call bull whiting. An hour's drive sough will more than pay off in terms of fish on ice.
The weather
It's Northwest winds at 15 to 20 knots Saturday and seas at 3 to 4 feet. Northwest winds lay down a little Sunday at 5 to 10 knots and seas 2 to 3 feet.
Jim Sutton writes a weekly fishing column for The Record. You can reach him with reports, photos, or various exaggerations at creekratstaug@gmail.com.
The Link LonkJanuary 08, 2021 at 09:46AM
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FISHING REPORT: Find warmer water, you'll find fish - St. Augustine Record
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