Catching a redfish shallow in the summer months is a magical experience. If you’ve caught redfish in the flats or the marsh, you know what I mean, especially if you caught it in on a surface lure. There is just nothing better than that aggressive… almost mean, water-frothing, the hole-in-the-water attack caused by a redfish striking your lure. Then you begin to hunt for them, because you know they are fun and feed aggressively, but they all but disappear or seem so spread out that it’s hardly worth the effort.
What if I told you that redfish are predictable? In fact, they are more consistent than other inshore species day-in and day-out.
From the time a tiny little redfish larva gets washed back into the back of an estuarine marsh pond, its sense of tide height and current begin to grow daily. Currents that would be almost imperceivable to us are magnified to them, as young redfish use the edges of these currents to feed on tiny forage, juvenile shrimp, and baitfish. They quickly learn they can use the current to move into an area as the tide rises, moving with ease and a relative lack of energy use, and how structure such as marsh grass, sea grass, and even oysters change the velocity at which water moves and makes prey susceptible to attack. They become keenly aware of where and when these currents begin and end the day.
They don’t understand why it happens and they don’t need to. Nor do they make conscious decisions about them. They just learn where they happen and what time, just as we know what time to avoid a certain intersection. Even with wind-driven current, they learn the daily patterns of when water moves because of the wind and instinctively know when to move to each location based on the direction and speed of wave patterns and the current they have learned to sense. By the time a redfish reaches the lower end of the slot, he has become a master at using currents to locate feeding areas to survive.
This is what the new redfish angler takes so long to learn. At first, redfish will occur to anglers as a random straggler across a marsh or flat. As we advance after what could be years of on-the-water experience, we finally learn what the tiny redfish learned his first year in the marsh pond. It’s at this time that we begin to look in specific areas for redfish that we’ve learned over time harbor just the perfect current, structure and forage.
Experienced anglers catch more redfish more consistently because they only spend time and energy in the right current and structure, and they understand how tide height affects that as well.
Tobin created TroutSupport.com – Tech Support for Speckled Trout and Redfish Anglers. Up Your Game!