Mobile Bay

Mobile Bay is an awesome place to fish but has a lot of variables to consider. Being the cyclical watershed that is I find that certain years produce larger catches of a particular species. Some years it is all about the speckled trout, some about the flounder, but this but this year has been all about the redfish.

I’ve written a bit about how the salinty and bait migrations affect the fish movements throughout the year but I am still baffled as what variables affect which species is going to be most prominent from year to year.

Wintertime is when I get to see first hand how the speckled trout population is doing by going to my winter holes where the big trout seem to stack up just waiting for me to throw my oversized jerk bats like the Paul Brown Fat Boy and the Unfair Lures Rip-n-slash 90mm. I have also noticed that these winter fish tend to really like the less natural color schemes in the clear cold winter water like pink and chartreuce although I’ve heard the latter appears like white to predatory fish.

Late summer and into the early fall transition is when the redfish do their thing and start showing up in good
numbers. I tend to find these ready to take topwater lures like the Heddon Spook Jr but the majority come on a 1/4oz jighead with a dark natural colored Zoom fluke and oftern scented with shrimp ProCure. My experience has been that the slot redfish gravitate towards the greener grass more so than the brown grasses that line the bay.

As the fall progresses the flounder start to do their thing. During the summer they frequent deeper water near structure but in fall they move into the shallows because of the abundance of shrimp in those areas. They are still structure oriented but move to seawalls, jetties and remnants of old docks and pilings. They will also congregate near creek mouths on an outgoing tide to take advantage of shrimp and fingermullet leaving the creeks. Shrimp imitations like the Vudu Shrimp of or 1/4oz jighead with Gulp! baits will catch them in numbers.

All in all Mobile has a pretty diverse fishery and maybe one day I will figure out the patterns that get one species more abundant from year to year.

Tight lines!