Finding Spring Flounder

“Throw right there.”

That’s what I told my wife Lisa as we trolled up toward a point of the northern shoreline of Willow Bayou.

She quickly flipped a smoke-colored Gulp! Swimming Mullet into the fracas and after dragging it a few feet, the line instantly went from stiff to slack.

A few seconds later, she was battling a big southern flounder, and I was already hooked after flipping a Swimming Mullet under the tiny ripples. Those ripples were made by tens of thousands of juvenile menhaden, the baitfish I call the flounder’s “Achille’s heel.”

Although shrimp, croakers and other baitfish are all important components of a flounder’s diet, menhaden, often called pogies or shad in Texas, are the prey source where I focus most of my flounder fishing efforts.

At times the results are stunning

Favorite Bait of Flounder

Three years ago, my father, Chester Moore, Sr., and I watched flounder literally jumping out of the water feeding on menhaden as millions congregated in a Sabine Lake cut during the storm tides spawned by Hurricane Alex.

Another time I caught more than a dozen flounder in a spot the size of my desk because it was inundated with menhaden.

Why are these fish so desired by flounder? It all boils down to opportunity. Of all of Texas’s bay-dwelling sport fish, flounder are the most opportunistic.

Because of their flat design, these fish are best suited as ambush predators and menhaden are easy to ambush.

Menhaden spawn numerous times from late fall through spring, producing numerous classes of juveniles, which gather in schools that sometimes number in the millions. These tiny fish often cannot swim well, so they are blown against leeward shorelines, which was the case with the example at the beginning of this story.

Anyone who has attended my flounder seminars, or one of my Flatfish University events has heard me talk about the importance of finding eddies (areas of slack water) in the bayous winding into our bays and along ship channels.

The reason is the tiny menhaden we most frequently encounter in the spring cannot negotiate strong tides well and will often congregate in eddies.

Flounder, being the consummate ambush predator, gather there as well and feed aggressively. The first spots I target are bayous, sloughs and other drains where I find concentrations of menhaden, and the first thing I look for is eddies.

When these tides are running extra high, I seek flounder along the main shorelines of bay systems. Attacking vast shorelines would be a waste of time and end up in dogged frustration so you have got to have a strategy.

Instead of looking over eight miles of shoreline, narrow your search down to an eighth of a mile. You must eliminate water to bag spring flounder. The first step I take while eliminating, is to once again look for a shoreline that has stands of Roseau cane.

Raising Cane

Roseau cane has an intricate system somewhat like a smaller version of mangrove, and it gives menhaden a place to linger, hide and dodge larger predators. It is best to fish these areas during the first couple of hours of a falling tide. As the water recedes, the menhaden are removed from their cover and the predator/prey dynamic begins.

There is something menhaden cannot resist, and the angler that learns this will usually catch the most flounder.

While fishing in the Sabine River near the DuPont Outfall Canal north of Sabine Lake I noticed a big alligator with half of its body out of the water, inches from the rocks and facing the bank. It would strike at the water every once in a while and then move on. At the same time, there were millions (and I do mean millions) of tiny shad that covered the Sabine’s shorelines from the outfall basically to Sabine Lake and then north up the Intracoastal Canal.

In the past, other anglers and I have noticed when gators act this way and there are fish busting on the tiny shad right on the rocks, flounder are on the move. Egrets and herons are another indicator, especially when they are feeding just a few feet away from alligators with seemingly no fear—and the big lizards are paying them no attention.

I call this “communal feeding.” In other words, a variety of predators are all focused on a very particular source of food without bothering each other. In this case it is tiny shad.

The problem for anglers in these situations is flounder will sometimes only hit tiny shad floated under a cork, or very small curl-tailed grubs tipped with a little piece of shrimp.

I was not rigged for either as the target was redfish that day, but I did manage to get one to hit a Gulp Swimming Mullet in smoke color and got lots of bumps that felt like a small flounder.

There are many riprap and bulkhead structures along the Texas Coast, and they can be thick with flounder. This is especially true when the shad are holding along the shorelines. Be prepared to match the hatch and keep an eye on the alligators.

Flounder, Bass and Crappie

Don’t worry about salinity levels. Unlike speckled trout, which can tolerate only moderate levels of freshwater, flounder can live with super low salinity and can be caught right alongside crappie and largemouth bass. These flounder receive very little pressure, so they have the chance to grow very large.

The very biggest flounder tend to hang out in close proximity to deep water. Target a large percentage of your effort toward deep water access points in ship channels and in areas where passes and channels intersect with bays—no matter where you fish.