I use 20-pound PowerPro double-uni-knotted to 30-pound fluorocarbon, a Shimano baitcasting reel and a 7-foot Waterloo rod. They are light yet have the backbone for chucking big suspended baits and topwaters a country mile. They also still possess the power and finesse to feel a subtle bite. They typically stay in water less than 6 feet deep, except in extreme temperatures. In the heat of the summer, they will move to depths greater than 10 feet, seeking cool water and in the winter they will move into the safety of deep river channels.
If you’re fishing in grassy areas, then use weedless jigs to help keep the weeds off your hook. Speckled trout will avoid bait with weeds caught on the hook, and might even scare them away because it looks abnormal. If saltwater inshore fishing is your game, you almost certainly like chasing after speckled sea trout. This species can at times seem easy to catch, but at others, specks can be frustratingly difficult to get on the end of the line. Hey, this is fishing, folks – there are no guarantees – but we can promise you one thing. Use these three speckled trout fishing tips, and you will up your game.
Anglers targeting trophy trout will do well using larger hard body plugs, soft plastic jerk baits, and live bait fish. Topwater plugs in particular tend to fool larger spotted sea trout. Once drawn to the sound of the popping cork, the helpless shrimp just dangling there will usually draw a strike.
The reason being that deeper water maintains its temperatures longer than shallower water, and Sea Trout will seek out the warmest water they can find during the colder months. Speckled trout can be caught on a variety of light to medium tackle. A good all-around setup is a medium-light rod with a reel spooled with 200yds of 10lb test. Depending on what type of bait is used, you can also expect to catch the odd flounder, sheepshead, black seabass, spot, croaker, stingray-the list goes on. Live bait fish catch both numbers and quality spotted sea trout.
Almost any combination of light tackle rods and reels will work, but most ‘serious’ trout fishermen prefer medium-sized spinning outfits spooled with 10-pound test line. Leaders should be made up from 20 to 25 pound-test material. Anglers seem to prefer corks that have rattles, as that ‘popping’ noise attracts trout to the bait.
My go-to arsenal of artificial lures for speckled trout are DOA shrimp. These plastics are perfectly designed to mimic the erratic motion of a fleeing shrimp with a twitch-twitch-pause action. I use three types of seatrout lures — topwater , subsurface Guided Fishing Boat Charters Bradenton Florida and soft plastics (Saltwater Assassin 5-inch jerk bait). With the subsurface suspending baits use a twitch-twitch-pause action. The all-tackle world-record 17-pound, 7-ounce seatrout hailed from Fort Pierce, Florida, near where I caught my trophy.
Since these lures imitate the sea trout’s primary food source, they work well. You can rig a soft plastic shrimp underneath a 3 to 5-inch popping cork to catch seatrout. While it’s controversial, depending on what state you are in, small croaker are also a common baitfish used for trout during the late spring and early summer. Fishing with croaker, which can be substituted with piggy perch, limits the amount of non-target fish you may encounter.
A trolling motor is preferred in shallow waters during the summer months due to sound, and is also a good idea for the winter months when fish are found in deeper water. One of the best methods of catching spotted sea trout is by targeting lighted docks with a live shrimp or bait fish. Alternately, a light source can be carried with you to attract them to you. Lighting can be a simple as a glow stick lowered into the water.