Article by Capt. Lance Smith
Although the weather and fishing reports may have you fooled, do not be misled into thinking that big fat flounder are not in our back bay right now.
In my column last week, I noted that what was caught the previous week is most likely what you will catch this week. Well, if no one starts putting in a concerted effort to catch anything, we might never know what to fish for! Someone has to lead before the rest of us follow and it might as well be you. With everything I have been trying to accomplish this spring to ensure a successful summer of fishing, I simply have not had the time to get out there. That will all change by the time you read this column. Given a sunny day or two, my dog and I will be limiting out in our favorite shallow water spring locations. Trust me people, they are out there, they are hungry and the largest flatties move in first. So, before they’ve been picked through and long before the fall migration to sea starts, you need to get out there now and cash in on the best flounder fishing of the year.
Now, like most saltwater species, the larger specimens can tolerate colder waters than their smaller brethren. You don’t see 50 lb. bluefin tuna caught off of Nova Scotia! Only the true giants roam those waters and there is a reason for it. Similarly, the majority of the flounder that you will catch this time of year will be keepers. Once the waters warm and the smaller fish are able to metabolize their food, you will be sorting through shorts (hopefully) all day long. But here we have a conundrum; although the biggest flounder invade the bay first, during this spring season the typical bait that they feed on is incredibly small.
There are no spot, no mullet and large bull minnows are just starting to come out of the marshes. What these early flounder do have to feed on is shrimp. When it comes to shrimp in our back bay there are pretty much four kinds.
Starting from the smallest and moving to the largest we begin with the grass shrimp. These are the little translucent guys that kids can typically catch a dozen or more of in a single swoop of a piling with a fine mesh net. Now, while these little arthropods are used to our north and sold in bulk to chum for species such as weakfish (sea trout), I don’t recommend actually trying to fish with them.
Slightly larger in size, sand shrimp are also prevalent this time of year. While a large grass shrimp may only measure an inch long, a big sand shrimp may be two inches in length. Sand shrimp are distinctive in that, like their namesake, they are sand colored and have black speckled bodies.
The third shrimp, and the one I try to imitate the most, is the mud or ghost shrimp. These freshwater crayfish look-alikes are molting this time of year and can reach lengths of about four inches. They are typically found on the shallower sandy flats and most flounder caught around the Thorofare this time of year will have a few in their stomach.
The final shrimp, and by far the largest, is the mantis shrimp. As an Environmental Scientist and nature freak, it still astounds me how similar these shrimp are in both morphology and physiology to their land based cousins. In fact, if you were to take the head and forward appendages from a mantis shrimp and a praying mantis and put them side by side, it would be incredibly difficult for the average person to tell them apart. Somewhere along God’s strange evolutionary line, he decided that they belonged both swimming in the sea and able to fly among the birds on land.
Often times, while jigging for flounder in shallow water, you may actually snag a mantis shrimp. These creepy, green colored shrimp (reaching over eight inches) have tails just like a lobster. Be careful of the spines though! On more than one occasion, I have landed larger flounder (four plus pounds) with one or even two mantis shrimp curled up in their stomach. However, every time I snag one and attempt to use it for live bait, I come up empty. Now, whenever I snag a few, they go home and straight into the steamer with some Old Bay! So, with mantis shrimp being a little on the large side as far as bait is concerned, and grass/sand shrimp being a bit on the small side, imitating the mud/ghost shrimp is your best option. Instead of jigging GULP! Swimming Mullet early in the season, try using their shrimp in new penny color.
The last thing I do when I fillet a flounder for the dinner table is to check the stomach contents. The kids love this! Take your hose and stick it as far down the flounder’s throat as you can. Press down on the gills, and if you have filleted around the stomach correctly, it will blow up to resemble a small water balloon. This will typically flush any undigested bait out. As a side note, when this stomach/balloon is fully expanded, you can poke a small hole or two in it with the water running and create what every child loves, “a flounder fountain!” With the hose down the flounder’s throat and while maintaining pressure on the gill plate, a few small slits in the stomach will spray water three feet high or more! Subsequently, this is how I suckered my young nieces (for some reason the boys are a bit squeamish), into cleaning all my flounder when they are around. Every kid on the block wants to see the flounder fountain! What I get out of it is a clear understanding of what these fish are feeding on and it is typically the smaller sand and grass shrimp. I will let you in on a little secret when you see this; shad darts. Yes, tandem rigged shad darts with a half inch tapered piece of squid on each rig will catch you a ton of flounder in the spring.
Obviously, when fishing such light baits, you need to be in some shallow water in order to keep contact with the bottom. Luckily, both sand shrimp and early flounder can be found in water as shallow as sixteen inches. By now, we all know that shallow waters in the bay warm up the quickest and the outgoing tide will produce the warmest water (which has come from the muddy/dark bottom of the upper bay). The profile of even the largest doormats allows them to disappear in water so shallow you can’t even get to them! This is why I love my silly pontoon boat. I can drift and jig through the shallowest flats in the spring without the worry of getting stranded.
Many people make the mistake of fishing the deeper channels in the spring. While you may catch a flounder doing this, those fish (being cold blooded) are most likely on their way to the shallower/warmer parts of the bay. Shorter drifts in smaller channels will pay off. For over two decades, I have watched the flounder in my favorite location move from two, to six, to twelve feet of water in the same channel as the spring progresses into summer. As this increase in preferred depth occurs, so does the flounders preference for increasing bait size. Also, don’t use live bull minnows on sandy flats and in sandy channels in the spring when bull minnows prefer a marshy habitat this time of year. Flounder recognize that these baits are out of place and will often ignore them. Instead, when fishing sandy flats and channels, stick with frozen shiners if you insist on dragging dead baits as these are the baitfish most often found in these areas.
While both bull minnows and frozen shiners (both usually combined with a strip of squid) will catch their fair share of flounder while drifting, jigging has become a far more productive technique in the past five years or so. When I first started flounder fishing as a youngster, we drifted these baitfish/squid combos for long distances along the channel edges throughout the bay and we caught quite few fish. One spring day about 17 years ago, a friend of mine (we will call him Guido) and I traded a carton of cigarettes for a Bahia rental skiff. It was mid-April and we covered the bottom of that skiff with keeper flatties by jigging bucktails and leftover shad darts from the Susquehanna shad fishery! From that day forward, everyone that steps on my boat better be ready to jig! Unless we are using live spot, mullet or peanut bunker, from mid-summer through the fall, even the youngest children in my extended family know how to properly jig tandem rigged baits.
Lance Smith is an outdoor writer and Captain of his family’s boat, ‘Longfin”.
