Bait Versus Lures for Stripers and Speckled Sea Trout

Got Bait IV is now live, and in this episode, we put soft crab baits up against BKDs and Bust ‘Em Baits. What’s really different in this episode, however, is our boat: we’re on a Yahama 190 FSH. It’s a jet boat built on Yamaha Watercraft hull, with a deck and liner designed to please us anglers. Does it work? I’ll let you be the judge.

Just in case you didn’t notice, we were pretty jazzed at actually catching a speckled trout. That’s because we were fishing in the Tangier Sound, which is at the Maryland/Virginia boarder. And while this area normally sees a fairly strong run of specks from May through November, everyone thought they would be MIA this year due to a huge winter die-off in Virginian waters. Remember how cold it got on the East Coast in February? There was a serious price to pay for that chill, to the tune of thousands of dead fish. And the kills didn’t just include speckled sea trout, but took a heavy toll on redfish, too.

If you’ve watched the other episodes of Got Bait? you might have started noticing a trend. It seems that lures almost always win out. It was only in Mahi-Mahi Madness that bait took the top spot. And in all the other episodes lures didn’t just win, they crushed.

Does that mean I’m giving up on bait? Heck no. If you think about it, there are plenty of fisheries out there that you can’t even use lures for. (Catfish, tilefish, and carp immediately jump into mind). When we’re looking at stripers and specks in marsh cuts and creeks, however, Marsh Island Mayhem proved the point—lures kick bait’s butt.