There are times when speckled trout can become incredibly frustrating. You know they’re in a particular hole or channel, you caught them there yesterday, and you can see them on the side-scan, but cast after cast goes unrewarded. We’ve all been there. And truth be told, if the fish simply won’t eat there will be times when you’ll go home skunked. But before you give up on those fish try these three tricks – sometimes one or another will save the day.
- Downsize your offerings in both weight and size. The speck pictured here was caught after multiple anglers were denied over and over again; he switched his half-ounce head and four-inch plastic for a tiny eighth ounce head and a 2.5-inch tail. Bites were still few and far between, but the larger lures remained entirely untouched. Fishing such a little lure required casting far up-current to gain enough sink-time to reach bottom in the eight-foot hole where the fish were sitting, but in the long run it was the only way to get bites.
- Try the herky-jerky style of retrieve. Rather than steadily retrieving, pop the tip up and erratically bounce and jiggle it so your offering quivers and dances more or less in place. Don’t even reel until letting it sink back down, and even then just take up the slack. This method doesn’t always trigger bites, but for whatever reason sometimes it does and when that happens it’s usually the only way to get them biting.
- Stick with the live stuff, and fish it with as little interference as possible. This is the time to take a thin wire hook that barely looks big enough, put it on a leader so light you can barely stand it, skewer a live shrimp, then flip it out and let it sit. Use no weight if possible or just a split-shot if you need it. Once it’s in the target zone, don’t move a muscle – just let it sit there and look tempting.
Again, there will be days when even this stuff doesn’t work. But when the specks have lockjaw, usually one of these tactics will trigger a few day-saving bites.