As you circle around looking for the fish, every angler onboard should have a line baited up and ready to go. As soon as you spot the fish shift into neutral, call out and have your anglers drop immediately. Using these tactics, you can hope for hook-ups about half of the time you locate a school. When you get one fish on it’s common to hook several at the same time, since these fish travel so tightly packed together.
Don’t be afraid to meander around for hours without ever dropping. Good drum anglers spend 70 to 80-percent of their time looking, not fishing. Giving up after a half an hour and deciding to just drift around with your baits down, hoping to accidentally intersect with a school of fish, is the biggest mistake you can make.
When a drum takes the bait, give it a three-count with the reel in freespool before locking up the drag. The reason you use a fishfinder rig is that black drum have sensitive mouths, and will feel the tension of the weight if it’s rigged in-line. If they feel it, they’ll spit the bait, so make sure there’s zero tension on the line when they initially run. Expect several blistering runs before the fish tires. Once it does, bring it up to boatside and use a very large net—one with at a hoop that’s at least three feet in diameter—to land the fish. Fish that are to be released should be un-hooked in the water if at all possible, to minimize stress.
The Gatherer
In other places, drum fishing is considered a game of sit and wait. Instead of searching for the schools of fish anglers will anchor up in water between 15’ and 25’ deep, in areas drum are known to frequent, where there are sloughs or troughs with a steep drop-off of several feet or more. Baits are cast out to the sides and behind the boat, and are simply left to sit on bottom until a fish picks them up.
For both of these tactics, baits include halved soft or peeler crab, or whole clams. When fishing soft crab you’ll want to wrap a piece of elastic thread (you can buy it at a craft store) around the crab a few times, to help secure it to the hook.
Remember that drum are considered fair eating fish, at best, and have large worms you will sometimes have to cut out of the meat. The worms can’t hurt you and the meat (particularly on fish under 30-pounds) is actually fairly good to eat (my opinion—many will disagree) but a single fish will provide plenty of steaks, so there’s really no reason to kill more than one per boat per day. And don’t forget to bring along a scale, so you know if you’ve broken that magic 100-lb mark!
--Lenny Rudow
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