HookedOnFishingBoats.com presents:

Spring is prime time for light tackle doormats.

Light Tackle Doormats

Coming soon: your chance to score a big flattie on ultralight.

            For the vast majority of anglers out there, flounder fishing means drifting around with weighted, baited rigs and relatively large gear. Darn shame—those flatfish have a unique way of striking and fighting, and going head-to-head with one on ultralight gear would b e a ton of fun, right? If that sounds like your idea of a good time then stay tuned, because your chance to hook up with a doormat on light gear is almost here.

Spring Feed

            We normally picture flounder sitting on the bottom along a channel edge or next to structure, waiting to ambush an incoming baitfish. The favored method of hooking up in this situation is dragging a Fluke Killer baited with a minnow/squid strip combo along the bottom. And for most of the fishing season, this is an accurate picture and a good way to catch these fish. But during the early spring months of March and April flatties move into the shallows, becoming vulnerable to light tackle casting and even fly fishing.

            Don’t be deceived by the term “shallows.” We’re not talking about five to 10 feet of water, here. The flounder will push up onto flats and bars that are just a couple feet deep, and sometimes, will be hooked just inches from the marsh grass. What the heck are these fish doing? Traditional theory holds that they move up onto the shallows to enjoy the sun-warmed waters. As the tide begins to fall, they’ll often hunt near the mouths of marsh creeks, which bring both warmer water and a food supply as they drain down. No doubt, there’s truth to this concept. But there’s more to it, as well. Gut the flatfish you catch in the shallows of coastal bays during the spring season, and quite often you’ll discover mantis shrimp in their bellies. The flounder seem quite fond of eating these shrimp—more often then not, you’ll find shrimp two to one over minnow, in this territory. Could it be that flounder enjoy eating the mantis shrimp because they happen to be a major predator of flounder larvae? Or, do they just taste good? Who knows. But one thing is for sure: when mantis shrimp are on the menu, flounder strike hard and fast. Jigs and bucktails become more effective than minnow-baited hooks, and the shallow water allows you to bring light gear to bear against them. In fact, they’re so shallow and vulnerable to temptation that this is also the number one opportunity to chase after flatties with fly gear.

Get Geared Up

What lures are best? In this situation, you can go after them by casting three-inch twister tails, Bass Assassin-style tails, and bucktails. Most flounder purists stick with a plain white buckail, and some will dress it with a small squid strip. More open-minded anglers—myself included—like to work with ¼-oz. leadheads dressed with white, chartreuse, or yellow plastic tails. Fly anglers will stick to streamers and deceivers that mimic minnow and shrimp. In low-light conditions or in discolored water, stick with darker colors like purple, root-beer, or dull orange.

When the tide is an hour from full high, start casting these lures to the shoreline and to shallow water structure such as oyster bars and marshgrass patches separated from the “mainland” marsh. Hop them along the bottom at a fairly fast rate, using your rod tip to make the lure jump now and again. If you’re into using fly gear, use short, fast strips and an intermediate sinking line, to be sure your offering stays close to the bottom.

A 6’ long, light action spinning rod and a reel spooled with six-pound diameter braid is ideal for this kind of fishing. The braid will give you a definite advantage, since you’ll be able to set the hook without any line stretch when the flounder strikes. And remember—this is not like bait fishing, where you allow the fish to chow down for a few seconds before setting the hook. Hit the fish hard, the moment you feel a take. As the tide switches and begins to fall, the fishing will often get even better as the flats start to drain. After the water levels have fallen it’s time to up-size your leadhead a tad, and go to ½ or ¾-oz. Shift your focus to the areas where the flats meet the channel edges, and start working slightly deeper; five to eight feet is a good zone to look for. The heavier head will allow you to hold bottom in these depths, even in an area of fairly strong tidal flow. Once the tide is more than half way down, it’s time to shift gears and use the more common baited hook/drift fishing or trolling methods in the deeper channel waters.

In order to access the shoals and shallows, obviously, a small boat is advantageous. Anything that requires more than two feet of draft becomes a handicap, and flat bottom jon boats and the like will have the best abilities to work in close to marsh cuts and sand bars.

A few notes about working the shallows in boats: Don’t forget that the noise you make will have an effect on the fish’s behavior. Loud bangs, such as those created by a slamming fiberglass hatch, can ruin an area for several minutes. Two-stroke outboards running at idle also create a racket. Interestingly, these motors are much quieter when in gear than they are at idle. So if you’re approaching a hotspot and have a high confidence level that fish are present, shut down the powerplant before shifting it into neutral. Four-strokes don’t have the same noise-making problems at idle, but running an electric motor is even more stealthy. Remember that the majority of the noise electrics create is prop noise, which is directly related to RPM. Accordingly, approach hotspots as slowly as possible. The least-recognized fish-spooking noise? The human voice. Talking at a regular speaking level, much less shouting, is audible from at least 50’ away under water. Warn your crew to hush the noise levels before coming close to your hotspots, and try to keep the celebratory shouting to a minimum when a fish comes over the gunwales.

So—are you ready to face the fluke mano-a-mano? Put your skills to the challenge, by hooking a doormat on ultralight gear—now’s the time to make it happen!

Look over squid carefully when buying it in a bait and tackle shop. You want the biggest and whitest squid you can find, so it can be sliced into long strips that will provide tantalizing flutter when drifted on a bottom rig. Do not buy squid if it appears small, yellow or inferior in any way. If it’s all you can get, use it to catch croaker, spot, perch and other fish you can then cut into strip baits for fluke.

To prepare squid for fluke fishing, pull the head and tentacles off the squid and save them as they too make productive baits. Then run the point of your knife into the open end of the squid body. Cut open the squid body and lay it flat. The reddish membrane on the outside of the squid should be scraped away with the knife blade. Then cut the squid into long, narrow strips that are slightly wider at one end and taper down to a point. Don't make the wide end too wide, or the strip may spin instead of flutter through the water. Hook the strip only once through the wide end.

Squid head and tentacles should be fished on some sort of rig that features dual, or tandem hooks (two hooks tied several inches apart that will pull a bait straight through the water), as they'll prevent the bait from balling up and spinning as the rig moves through the water.

Minnows:

Also known as killies or mummichogs, depending on where you’re from and where you fish, minnows are one of a flounder’s favorite meals. While a minnow can be fished alone, many anglers use them along with a strip of squid. The classic squid-and-minnow “sandwich” has been used by generations of anglers to catch millions of fluke. The squid strip goes on the hook first, followed by the minnow, hooked through both lips.

Minnows can be purchased at bait and tackle shops, or anglers can net, trap or catch their own. They’re often kept in a baitwell, or in a bait bucket hung over the side of the boat. It seems the older I get, the more often I forget to lift the bait bucket back into the boat before I take off to re-position the boat for another drift. The bait bucket bouncing along the surface of the water creates quite a commotion; it’s possible to lose the bait bucket, and the minnows in it, if the bucket’s handle is broken off. That’s why I prefer to keep minnows inside the boat, either in a baitwell, or even better yet, in a small cooler that does not even require water to keep them alive.

In preparing the cooler to hold minnows, the first thing that goes in is ice. It’s best to put the ice in a sealed plastic bag so the water will be contained as the ice melts. Lay the bag of ice flat on the bottom of the cooler. If no bag is used, it will be necessary to occasionally pour off the water. A wet towel or rag, or some wet newspaper, is then spread on top of the ice. The minnows then go on top of the wet rag or newspaper. Keep the lid on the cooler, and the coolness from the ice plus the moisture from the rag or newspaper will keep the minnows alive all day. With this type of bait cooler, you simply reach in and pluck out the minnow you want; there’s no need to dip them with a small net as is required when minnows are kept in water in a baitwell.

Bluefish:

Fresh bluefish is a very effective flounder bait. If I happen to catch a small bluefish, it is immediately placed on the bait board and prepared for use as bait. I fillet each side of the fish. From each fillet, I will slice two or three long strips; big flounder have no problem attacking strip baits up to 12 inches long. Strips should be cut so they are slightly wider at one end, narrowing down so that the other end almost comes to a point. 

Sea Robin:

Bluefish is one of my very favorite flounder baits, and fresh cut sea robin is another top choice. Strips from the upper back portion of a sea robin, where the skin and scales are dark, are just as effective as white belly strips. Sea robin skin is tough and stands up well to abuse from small hardhead and other would-be bait stealers.

Live Baits - Blues, Bunker, Hardhead, Spot and Perch:

When you’re fishing specifically for doormat flounder of 5 pounds and up, probably the best bait you can use is a small, live bluefish. Some of the largest flounder ever caught, including the IGFA All-Tackle World Record, were taken on live snapper bluefish.

Bluefish and other live baits can be fished effectively using a fish-finder rig, or a sliding egg sinker rig. Hook the bait through the lips, or through the nostrils, or through the eye sockets, or through the back under the dorsal fin. With live baits, it may be a good idea to tie the hook onto the leader with a palomar knot, leaving a long tag end. A small treble hook can be tied to the tag end, and one point of the treble hook can be hooked through the bait’s tail. That stringer rig provides a hook at both ends of the bait, increasing the chances a flounder will be hooked when it grabs and begins to swallow the bait.

Many smaller flounder won’t bother with these live baits, so you probably won’t catch as many flounder as you would with strip baits, but your chances of catching a true doormat flounder increase considerably when you’re using live baits.

Spot, croaker, herring and small white perch also make tantalizing flounder baits when live-lined near the bottom. It's usually a good idea to fish most live baits during tidal periods when the current isn't too strong; a strong current will often cause live baits to spin.

It’s important to be aware of the regulations in the state in which you are fishing. If there is a minimum size limit on bluefish, croaker or any other species that you may use for bait, then the fish used for bait must meet that minimum size requirement.

Bunker and Peanut Bunker:

Practically every predator on the inshore grounds, and in our bays and tidal rivers, loves to eat bunker. Bunker, also known as mossbunker, menhaden, pogy and fatbacks, are an incredibly important forage fish. Unfortunately, in some areas, especially Chesapeake Bay, they've been overexploited, and a shortage of bunker is causing serious problems among the predators that rely on them. The problems include undersized, malnourished, and diseased fish, especially striped bass. This is an urgent situation that must be addressed, and soon, by fisheries managers!

Juvenile menhaden, commonly called peanut bunker, show up in bays and tidal rivers in the late summer and early fall. They can be hooked on Sabiki rigs, and caught in cast nets. However, they're fragile and difficult to keep alive; they won't last but a few minutes in a bucket of saltwater. The baitwell on your boat may work, or it may not. Special bait stations that keep water well-aerated are available in bait and tackle shops and fishing catalogs, and most do a good job of keeping bunker alive and frisky. They'll keep kicking longer if hooked through one eye socket (just in front of the eyeball) and out through the other eye socket.

Schools of adult bunker can often be seen splashing and flashing on the surface of the water. The tightly-packed fish can be snagged by tossing a large, weighted treble hook, or a big jighead or bucktail, into the bunker school and jerking it through the fish. Whatever is used to snag bunker, it should feature a large (8/0) hook with a wide gap. Too often, bunker snagged on hooks without a wide gap will fall off, especially as they are being lifted from the water into the boat.

Flounder Fins:

After you have used the baits described above to catch a limit of fluke, including a few doormats, and as you stand at the cleaning table filleting your catch and anticipating a delicious flounder dinner, make it a point to save an important part of the carcass. The long fin around the edge of a flounder makes a very good flounder bait. Trim the fins as you clean flounder, cut the fins into 6 to 10-inch sections, then refrigerate or freeze them until your next flounder trip. A long, fluttering ribbon of fin will provoke strikes from big flounder.

Cutting bait is a very important job, so take your time and do it right. Always use a sharp knife, and carefully cut strips from prime spots on the baitfish, such as the belly and shoulder sections. Make sure each strip is thin, with no bones or ragged edges that may cause the bait to spin instead of flutter.

Other baits that will trigger fluke strikes include chunks of peeler (sheddar crabs), live sand fleas, strips of mackerel belly, grass shrimp, bloodworms, sandworms, live mullet and mullet strips, and even strips of chicken breast. As we said earlier in this chapter, fluke are an aggressive fish that attack and eat a wide variety of marine life. But if you want to target the doormats, try these big baits. Remember, when it comes to flounder big baits really do equal big fish.

As you might expect, the usual flounder techniques will prove effective in most locations: simply drag fluke killer rigs baited with the old stand-by bull minnow/squid strip “sandwich,” and you’re going to hook some fish. But if you’re looking for a different challenge—one that lets you target flatfish with light tackle and boost the level of by-catch with species like stripers and weakfish—jigging is the way to go.

Plastic body twister or paddle tail jigs in the four-inch range are a great flounder lure, and one that will be eaten by these other fish any day of the week. Chartreuse is a top color choice for most fish, but when it comes to flounder in specific, white sometimes seems to hold a slight edge. In off-colored water, yellow is often the ticket. In low-light conditions, purple should be your go-to color. A bucktail dressed with a chunk of peeler crab, a squid strip, or a fat bull minnow is also a good lure to choose for jigging up flatties.

Most of the time, jigs of all types should be worked vigorously, with a sharp snap of the rod on the up-swing followed by a free-fall until the jig hits bottom—or gets eaten. The vast majority of your hits will come as the jig sinks, and often you can detect a hit simply by watching your line and noting that it seems to hit bottom a few feet before you expected it to. As soon as you feel or see a strike, set the hook with gusto.

When the tide’s dropping and the fish seem a bit slow to strike, “jiggling” your jig becomes the most effective method. Simply lower the jig to the bottom, pull it up six or eight inches, and gently shake your rod to impart a vibration to your lure. Often, the suspended jiggling lure is simply more then the flounder can take.

The windier it is, the tougher it will be to hold bottom with light jigs. In 12’ to 20’ of water, a one-ounce head is almost always heavy enough. But go any deeper and two ounces is usually necessary. You can help the jigs sink better and stay deep longer by sticking with thin diameter line. Eight or 10 pound mono will work, but 12-lb. test, 4-lb. diameter Fireline or other super-braid is the best line for this job. Any braid or super-line will work better in this situation than mono. You can also keep your lures down at the bottom by slowing your drift with a drift sock, or sea anchor, and dedicated anglers who focus on this fishery wouldn’t think of fishing without one.

A 6’6” light-action spinning rod matched up with a Penn 4300SS, a Shimano 2500 Symetre, or a similar-sized reel is perfect for this style of fishing. And, it’s a heck of a lot more fun fighting those doormats on light gear like this, then it is to hoist ‘em up with the heavier stuff most guys use—as they drag those minnow/squid sandwiches across the bottom.

--Lenny Rudow