5 Tips for Cold Weather Speckled Trout

There’s a chill in the air, water temps have dropped, and you’ll need to bundle up to go fishing? That doesn’t mean warm-loving species like speckled sea trout have to come off the target list. In fact, fishing for specks in chilly weather can be quite productive. Take these five tips into consideration the next time you start piling on the layers and want to take home a cooler full of fish.

1. Look for areas where water temps are slightly elevated. Channels that drain flats are a good example. Following a high tide early in the day, sun-warmed waters coming off of a flat late in the day can draw in trout like a magnet.
2. Look for weedbeds. Weedbeds also absorb heat on sunny days, and can be noticeably warmer than the surrounding waters.
3. Leave the topwater lures in your tacklebox, and work near the bottom. After significant cool-downs the specks will often shuffle off to deeper areas and the topwater bite can be completely shut down. Bouncing jigs along bottom is often going to be a much better bet.
4. Up-size your offerings. When it gets cold out the fish want to minimize their caloric expenditure and maximize their potential caloric reward. They become much less inclined to go chasing after small prey, and instead focus on larger meals when they need to feed. As a result, the four-inch lures that were so effective a while back may go untouched, while the six-inch lures that you normally reserve for larger predators may become a whole lot more effective.
5. Slow down your retrieve. This doesn’t necessarily mean you should work your lures any less vigorously and in fact, specks often continue to respond to very erratic retrieves when the water temps drop. However, how quickly you move that lure over long distances does make a big difference. Again, this is because the fish don’t necessarily want to go on a wild goose chase that may or may not end up with them burning off more energy than they’ll gain. So continue to work that rod tip, but slow down your cranking hand.

BONUS TIP: When it gets cool, the trout will sometimes reduce the tidal window they feed in. What was once a two-hour bite can turn into a 45-minute bite. So if you catch some fish in quick succession and then the bite totally dies off on a change of the tide, consider pursuing a different quarry until the tide’s close to changing again.