Article by Sue Foster
It’s another year of the Coastal Fisherman! I was wondering what to write about when my husband, Bob flipped through his cell phone and brought up the picture of a flounder we caught last November. It was a fat, “just” legal flounder that had a 7-inch flounder inside it’s stomach!
Flounder, when they are hungry, are aggressive feeders. It’s hard to have a hook that is too big or a bait that is too large when it comes to the size of the flounder’s mouth! But you do need to match the “hatch” and present a bait that looks like what the flounder are feeding on.
In the fall, flounder are feeding on spot, mullet, alewives, lizardfish and obviously, baby flounders! In the spring, they are feeding on grass shrimp, little crabs, minnows, shiners, glass minnows, clam, mussels and baby trout… whatever is available in the water.
Summer flounder (also called fluke) spend their winter offshore on the Continental Shelf. In the spring, the migrate to bays and estuaries searching for food. In the spring, you are more likely to find them in the “flats” (shallower water) as they look for water warmed by the sun’s rays.
The first flounder of the season in Ocean City are usually found in the relatively shallow waters around the Route 90 Bridge or in the bay behind Assateague, close to the Verrazano Bridge in 5 to 12-feet of water. When these fish are hanging out in shallow water areas their diets may be different than when you find them later on in 15 to 40-foot holes!
The first natural baitfish that comes to mind is grass shrimp. It never fails that when you pull those first flatties of the season into your boat, they toss up grass shrimp! You’d think that shrimp for bait in the spring would work but it doesn’t seem to particularly appeal to them. Flounder are site feeders and it seems that baits that flip up and down in the water column like bait shrimp are more likely to appeal to their senses. I think that’s why good ol’ fashioned squid strips work so well, because they flutter in the water like a flag waves in the wind! My favorite bait in the spring is a live minnow hooked through the lips or a frozen shiner hooked through the eyes with a simple strip of tapered squid on the hook. I do like to use the box of calamari squid rather that the precut variety because it is thinner and flutters better, but it can be cold in the spring and pre-cut is certainly easier to use!!!
Since the flounder are often feeding on grass shrimp in the spring, pink is a good color to use on your rig. Pink teaser tails, plastic squids or pink Gulp! Swimming Mullet Gulp is popular. Orange can be good in the spring as well. Chartreuse is fine on sunny days and you can never, ever go wrong with white, as it is consistently the best all around color throughout the entire season. A certain color may be hot one day but turn the fish off another day. White will never turn a fish off.
Flounder feed on smaller baits in the spring than they do in the fall. The baitfish that are naturally there are smaller. As the summer progresses, the baitfish grow larger in the bays and anglers start using bigger baits. Flounder like to hide themselves on the bottom either in sandy or grassy bottom. They wait, looking up, and ambush their prey as it comes moving by in the current. You need to keep your bait close to the bottom and work the tides as they start to slow down.
Summer flounder face into the current when they are feeding since that is typically the direction the bait is coming from. Yes, they need some current to move the natural baits around. When total slack time comes, the flounder can quit feeding. You will notice in the spring that the flounder may also have little crabs of some sort in their stomachs. Sometimes there’s even pieces of mussel shells! That means they are feeding close to a marsh or sand bar. In some places in our bays we have mussel beds. There are even tiny oysters growing on some of the marshes. Baitfish such as minnows and shiners are attracted to these beds as well.
The mouth of a creek, the bridge piling in the water, the tip of a sand bar and the edge of a marsh can create a rip in the water. Down-tide from that rip, as the tide moves along, will often be an “eddy.” This is where the tide seems calmer. This is also where the natural bait moved along by the tide is dropped and where the flounder may be feeding. Often times, there is a change of water depth as well. PERFECT! Try fishing there!
Live or frozen bait, drifting along in the current has it’s own motion and smell. If you are primarily using Gulp! artificial baits with no real bait on the hook, you need to jig it up and down off the bottom to give it action. If you watch videos of jigging Gulp! on the internet you will notice that anglers are NOT jigging way UP and then way DOWN. It’s more like short jerks of the rod tip. Jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, BAM… set hook and REEL!
Many anglers like to make a rig with a ½ to ¾ ounce bucktail on the bottom (instead of a sinker) then go up on the line and make a dropper loop and add a hook. A 4-inch Gulp! Swimming Mullet is used on both the bucktail and the top hook.
I like to have the full advantage of bait and Gulp!. I slide a Gulp! Swimming Mullet on the hook and then slip on a live minnow or frozen shiner. No, I’m not a purist. I just want some flounder for dinner! The important thing about Gulp! is to change your bait every 20 minutes or so. Put it back in the GULP! juice to rejuvenate it. You can use it again later so it doesn’t go to waste.
My husband likes a rig with no Gulp!. He makes a high/low rig out of all mono leader and two plain hooks. He slides a 3-inch white curltail grub past the eye of the hook onto the leader, and he likes to use plain o’ live minnows. The little white grubs are like teasers and they really work!
Flounder in the spring… good fishing!
Sue Foster is an outdoor writer and co-owner of Oyster Bay Tackle in Ocean City, MD and Fenwick Tackle in Fenwick, DE.
