Reds in the bay, reds in the marsh

Head to Bay St. Louis for a quick limit, head to the Biloxi Marsh for trophy redfish

Ed Ellington’s orange cork had barely settled in the water, just off the bank at the end of a 15-yard cast, when it shot under the water like a brick was tied to the end of the line.

Ellington was in the process of sitting down on a cooler lid and wasn’t alerted.

“Ed! Ed! Ed! You got one,” Capt. Sonny Schindler said. “Reel tight, right now.”

Ellington, a retired federal judge from Jackson, did as instructed, and quickly, his 6½-foot spinning rod was bowed in a nice arc. From a sitting position, he began getting line back on the spool. 

“Doesn’t feel too big,” he said, “but he’s pulling like he thinks he’s a whale.”

I grabbed the net and stood along the starboard gunwale, waiting to slide the webbing under the fish. As the fish raced past the side of the boat, it appeared to be a sheepshead at first glance.

“Naw, that’s a nice puppy drum,” Schindler said. “About the sweetest-tasting fish swimming around here.”

The second pass put the fish within easy reach. Into the net it went on its way to an ice bath in the fish box.

Now, here’s the best part of the preceding scene: it took longer to read than it did for Schindler to get us to that spot along the bank, a nondescript stretch on the north side of Bayou Portage, a tributary on the east side of the Bay of St. Louis. It was less than 100 yards from Sunset Landing off Henderson Avenue in Pass Christian, where the captain had met the three of us. Schindler had launched near his home in Bay St Louis, just a few minutes across the bay.

Less than 5 hours and maybe a half-mile farther down Bayou Portage, we finished our fishing trip. We had a limit of slot redfish, a pile of puppy drum and a sheepshead. Schindler also tagged and released a couple of dozen “rats” — redfish that are shorter than the size minimum: 18 inches Mississippi, 16 inches in Louisiana.

Ellington produced the fish of the day, a 22-inch red with 164 spots — 84 on one side and 80 on the other.

A trophy catch is what it was.

“One of the best things about using Bay St. Louis or Pass Christian as a port in the late fall or winter is that in the right conditions, you don’t have to make a run across the Gulf of Mexico to the marsh,” said Schindler, who operates the 8-boat Shore Thing Charters fishing group. “That can be a blessing when it’s cool or when it’s a bit windy or choppy. It also means you spend 98% of the day fishing, with very little running.”

Very little? How about next to none.

Schindler idled along on his big outboard engine long enough to conduct the morning prayer and go over the safety features of his boat. Then, he switched to the electric trolling motor up front and eased us into casting distance of the bank. 

“Obviously, it isn’t always this easy or productive,” he said. “The key is a super-high or high tide that peaks in the middle of the morning. That pushes the fish up out of the middle of the bay to the banks to feed. The high water pushes the baitfish to the shoreline and allows us to get close enough to cast.

“This starts getting good in mid-fall and will last through the winter. We just watch the tide charts and when we have (clients) who just want to get some fish to eat or have kids who just need action, this is what we do.”

It’s just as obvious that some other fishermen seek a bigger tug on the line. That’s when the longer run from the shore to the Biloxi Marsh south of Waveland is required.

In the Biloxi Marsh, it’s often difficult to find keeper reds, but not for the same reason one runs into in the bay. In the marsh, you are just as likely to tie into bull reds — big mature reds over the 30-inch maximum for keeping.

“If you want to feel the power, then there’s nothing like redfish in the marsh in December — well, anytime in the fall or winter,” Schindler said. “You can often find schools of 50 or hundreds of them cruising the shoreline on the outer banks, or even in the bayous in the marsh.”

Tides play a big role in fishing success in the marsh, but quite often, captains have to watch the wind. Strong north winds can blow the water out of the marsh and make it difficult to fish the many ponds and drains. And in the winter, passing  weather fronts can make the passage from the mainland to the marsh too uncomfortable, too risky and downright impossible to run.

“That’s another reason why we rely on the inshore fishing in the bay or on the Highway 90 bridge pilings, especially later in the winter when the sheepshead start stacking on the pilings,” Schindler said, pointing over his left shoulder back toward the south. “That’s the Highway 90 bridge right there, maybe a mile from here (Bayou Portage).”

Having the marsh and the bay available is a blessing for the nearshore charter industry and for recreational fishermen in their own boats. While some days may be lost to weather, it’s rarely impossible not to be able to do one or the other.

“Of course, none of that matters if the fish aren’t cooperating, and we’ve been fortunate the past few years,” Schindler said. “We’ve had good fishing in the bay and in the marsh.”

Either way, Schindler recommends never leaving port without either live or dead shrimp and perhaps some cocahoe minnows. Spinnerbaits, soft plastics and other lures are more fun and easier to cast, but Schindler said the real thing is always more dependable for putting fish in the box.

“For redfish and puppy drum, if you noticed today, we caught just as many, if not more, on frozen bait shrimp than on live shrimp or minnows, and you didn’t get a single fish on a lure,” he said. “It’s the same thing when we fish the pilings.”

In the Biloxi Marsh, especially when the big schools of reds are spotted, that’s when it’s time to pick up and chunk the spinnerbaits, grubs and other lures.

“They’re on missions, looking for food,” Schindler said. “Put something — and I mean just about anything — in front of their big, red heads, and they will move on it and take it.”

Five years earlier, Schindler had taken pro bass fisherman Pete Ponds of Gluckstadt and another fishermen to the marsh. The catch that day was between 50 and 60 redfish, but it took all day to catch a limit of keeper, slot-sized fish. Most all of the fish caught were oversized.

“And if you remember, none of those fish came on live bait,” he said. “We caught them on everything from topwaters to spinnerbaits, crankbaits to grubs. We started out in insulated jump suits and finished in short-sleeve T-shirts. We had a decent, but not great, tide range that day, and we caught fish on the rise, the peak and then on the fall.

“You need tidal movement no matter where you fish in the Gulf or connected waters, but those super-high and high tides, man they are perfect for fishing inshore and maximizing the time spent casting and catching.”

Tagging redfish: more than just a hobby

If you fish often enough the inshore and nearshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico near Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis, chances are pretty good that you’ll eventually reel in a redfish sporting a small tag — compliments of Capt. Sonny Schindler.

“I can’t tell you how many I’ve tagged over the past few years, but I can promise you it numbers in the thousands,” said Schindler, of Shore Thing Charters. “I’ve got tagged redfish swimming all over the Gulf, and all of them have been tagged either in the Bay, in the Biloxi Marsh or along the shoreline of the Gulf. I also tag tripletails.

“They’re swimming in Mississippi and Louisiana and beyond. I’ve had several redfish recaptures from Louisiana waters up in Lake Ponchartrain and over to Perdido on the Alabama-Florida border. My longest recapture was a tripletail I released off Cat Island that was caught in Matagorda Bay in Texas.”

Schindler claims a 5% to 10% recapture rate on redfish. 

On a recent trip in the Bay, Schindler tagged and released more than 20 rat reds caught by his anglers. One of the other Shore Thing captains was fishing about a half-mile away.

“Hey Capt. Sonny,” came the call on the radio. “We just recaptured one of your tagged fish.”

That was music to Schindler’s ears, and he broke out in a big grin.

“Record the number, the length and the coordinates, and get that info to me,” he said. “I’ll look him up and see when and where he was tagged and get the information to the fishermen.”

Schindler doesn’t tag fish just for fun; he shares info with the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratory. 

“Those guys do great work and have many research programs going, and tagging and tracking redfish and tripletails are just two of them,” he said. “But yeah, I also do it for me, because I have a stake in this fishery. It’s my life, my livelihood and one of my passions. Whatever I can do to assist in fishery management and fish production, I’m all up in that. I’ve had a fish recaptured 500 days after we tagged it; most are quicker.”

Within two weeks of one trip, Schindler emailed one angler a recapture report of a 15-inch red he had caught that the captain tagged that morning in the bay. Two weeks later, an angler named Roger Burnell recaptured it about 200 yards away; the fish was 153/4 inches long, meaning it had grown 3/4 of an inch.

That quick recapture is interesting, but isn’t even close to Schindler’s record.

“No, my record came about three weeks after (that),” Schindler said. “We captured a red at Cat Island one morning and got all excited when we saw the tag hanging from it. I grabbed it, noticed it didn’t have a lot of slime or dirt or anything else on it, so I knew it hadn’t been long in the water.

“When I read the number, I recognized it. I had tagged that 12-inch red 10 minutes earlier and caught it about 10 feet away from where we caught it the first time.”

Now, that was one hungry redfish.