May is a great month for speckled trout in Mississippi’s Gulf waters
Our May morning, which had started so beautifully with a vivid sunrise to the east, had yielded only a few bites on shallow bars around Cat Island. The three speckled trout we’d caught were nice, averaging about 3½ pounds, obviously females with their bellies fat with eggs four days before the full moon.
But an hour of casting on such a promising day should have produced more, or at least Capt. Tom Sutton thought so. He kept staring to the southwest as boats kept passing by, about one every 10 or 15 minutes.
“I’ve heard the bite has been good at Flat Boat Key,” he said. “I reckon they heard it, too. Guess it’s time we join them. Let’s get ready for a nice run to Flat Boat. It’ll be a little bumpy, so let’s hope there’s room left for us.”
With that, Sutton battened down the boat’s compartments, punched some numbers into his GPS, and throttled up the 250-horse engine. The 22-foot boat responded instantly, rose up on top of the chop and raced to the southwest. The sun was full and a few degrees above the horizon, and as we kept it over our left shoulders, we noticed its effect on the wind was working in our favor.
“Calming down, seas flattening,” Sutton shouted over the noise as he pushed the throttle down a little more.
The armada
It was easy to spot Flat Boat Key from more than a mile away, with so many boats seemingly anchored together the length of the popular and well-known fishing spot. As we approached, we could see each was anchored, with about 50 feet between them. Had to be over 50 of them, forming a nearly mile-long curved reef over what was once a rim of a barrier island at the east end of the Biloxi Marsh near Isle Aux Pitre. The bottom is hard on the key, mostly oysters and other shells, perfect for holding trout.
“Dang,” Sutton said, as he slowed and tried to find a promising parking spot. “Pretty slim pickings; pattern’s full.”
As we passed the boats, we saw a lot of casting but not a lot of catching.
“Let’s go to the South end, try to find anything that looks different and stop,” Sutton said. “The guy who first took me here said he might come today … and there he is. See that last boat down there alone? That’s him.”
Sutton throttled back up, swung wide outside the line of boats and pulled in near his buddy, who was reeling in a 14-inch speck as we arrived. He tried to hide his catch as best he could until he recognized the boat.
“Took you long enough, Tom,” one man said. “We’re catching a good many fish, but they’re kind of small; only half are keepers. Anchor somewhere outside our casting range and throw back toward the marsh. They’re all out there, but you best have live shrimp; they’re not eating plastics at all.”
Within 10 minutes, we were catching 12-, 13- and an occasional 14-inch trout on every cast, with a lot of short fish mixed in. Sutton said they were all males, with slim bodies that, when squeezed, exuded milt.
“There’s got to be bigger fish somewhere close, females,” he said, “but for now, let’s be satisfied just filling the box a little.”
But our position was a problem. The incoming current was increasing and pushing us back toward his friend’s casting range. I pulled up our Power Poles and Sutton put the trolling motor on high and we moved north. After moving about 30 yards, we felt a sudden “thunk” against the motor’s lower unit when we hit something solid. It was part of the hardbottom, composed mostly of oyster shells, and almost boulder-like.
“Tom, we’re right on top of the key, I think,” I said.
At home on the rock
“Looks like it; there’s another big lump over there,” he said, pointing with his rod tip. I looked, and liked what I saw … a lot. There was a line of high spots running in a line for about 15 yards.
“You can see the current going around this ridge and meeting on the backside. See the foam coming together? That looks interesting,” I said, lowering the Power Poles.
My first cast sent a shrimp flying toward the spot where the two tides merged, the popping cork hit with a plop and never stopped. It shot beneath the surface instantly.
“Fish on!” I hollered.
“Me too,” said Sutton, who was already reeling in a fish.
The drag gears inside my Shimano spinning reel were busy. The fish was taking line; it didn’t feel like a speck.
“Think I either got a drum or a red,” I said. “Got too much to be a speck.”
It took me about a minute to turn the fish, and as it came to the boat, Sutton was standing next to me with the net waiting to see what was coming.
“Whoa!” he shouted in my ear. “That’s a speck, a giant trout.”
The fish suddenly came to the surface and started thrashing as trout are apt to do, but this one was big enough to splash us with water from 10 feet away. I guided it to the net, and Sutton swooped it up in the boat.
“Six pounds, maybe seven,” he said, dropping the net and racing to re-bait his line and make another cast. While I was releasing my big fish back to the Gulf — I don’t like the big sows when it comes to eating — Sutton was reeling in another fish. It was his second 2-pounder, which he put in the icebox. My big fish went back in the Gulf.
Reality struck.
“Late to the show, but looks like we still got the best seats in the house,” I told Sutton. “I think we found the sweet spot.”
Current-ly biting
As is often the case in fishing, luck plays a big role. Out of the over 50 boats at Flat Boat Key, we’d landed on the key spot, a perfect spot formed by the merging of currents split by a ridge. Where the currents came back together, the fish were stacked waiting for the natural movement of the sea to bring them meals.
Because of the way it worked, casting need not be precise. All either of us had to do was put our baits in the water in line on either side of the split and let the current do the magic. The corks would take 30 seconds or so to ride the water around the ridge and float right into the fish. Once there, the cork would suddenly shoot out of sight.
My first 10 casts all produced fish, all more than 4 pounds. Sutton caught fish on every cast, too, but his were in the 2- to 2½-pound range. The difference was one of two things, we decided.
“It’s either because I’m coming around the right side of the ridge and you the left side, or it’s because you’re fishing about a foot deeper than I am,” he said. “Let’s figure it out; switch places.”
I moved to the front of the boat, and he went to the back. I cast the way he’d been casting, and he threw the way I had been. Our corks immediately began racing with current on opposite sides of the ridge and eventually merged together. His disappeared first and he hooked up with a trout. A few seconds later, mine shot underneath with an audible plop easily heard from 60 feet away.
“I got another giant,” I said.
“I got another keeper,” he said.
Depth-specific
We’d found the answer. The 10-inch difference in depth between our lines had to be it. Sutton found another rod in his arsenal rigged just like mine, baited it up and made a cast.
Soon, he was hooked up with a line-puller.
From that point on, we had two choices: Fish 3 feet deep and catch 5- and 6-pounders, or fish 2 feet deep and catch “eating-sized” fish.
“What a wonderful dilemma,” I told Sutton. “This will be one of those all-time trips we’ll never forget.”
In our joy, we hadn’t noticed that soon, we were one of only two boats still on Flat Boat Key. Sutton’s friends had stopped fishing and were only watching as we kept catching big fish after big fish.
Our box was getting full and yet, it only held 25 fish. We’d spent so much time catching the bigger fish — of which we only kept two that had been mortally wounded by hooks — that we were well short of the limit. With Flat Boat Key just over the edge of the state line in Louisiana, the limit was 25 each, about twice what we had.
I made the decision and told Sutton that we had reached the limit of what I desired to clean.
“Me too,” he said, turning to wave in his friends. “Y’all come over here and anchor right where we are, and y’all can have them.”
After switching places and explaining how to work the current to reach the magic spot, they were immediately catching big trout.
We left with the fish still biting and with grown mean hollering like little kids behind us.
What a great day.
A year later, with May approaching, we’re already making plans to find that sweet spot again, and we will, thanks to the pin dropped on Sutton’s GPS unit. We hope the tide will be working at just the same rate.
Success: a fine line
So often with fishing, there is a fine line between success and failure. Even when the action is good, there is always one spot, one magic hole, where the action is the hottest.
For us, it was finding a break in Flat Boat Key where the current was allowed to split, and then merge, creating a vortex, so to speak, where fish could sit and wait for meals to naturally come their way.
Sure, we found ours by luck, but we also learned that a slight difference in the natural sea bottom, along with a slight adjustment in depth of bait presentation, made all the difference in the catch.
Those other 50 boats that had pulled up and left over the 2½ hours we were there had scattered in different directions, obviously dissatisfied with their results and off to find their own hot spots.
In May, Mississippi Sound holds many such places.
“Especially on the full moons, really from April all the way through June,” said Capt. Sonny Schindler of Shore Thing Charters in Bay St. Louis. “Our trout spawn on the full moon, and if you can get on the right sand bar at Cat Island or one of the other islands, or even down at Flat Boat Key, in the few days before or after the moon goes full, then you can hit the jackpot and really hit the big sows.
“Between the full moons, you just have to look for the right pockets of water that have good salinity and plenty of bait. In recent years, there’s been a lot of freshwater coming into the marsh from the Mississippi River, especially when they’ve had to open (the Bonnet Carre Spillway) at Lake Ponchartrain. All of that freshwater coming through the spillway pushes the trout out, and as it moves toward the Gulf through Lake Borgne and the marsh, the trout move further east. Louisiana’s loss is Mississippi’s gain. Redfish can tolerate the freshwater, but the trout don’t like it at all.”
Go east, young (and old) trout
The encroachment of the freshwater can actually improve a fisherman’s odds of finding a huge cache of trout holding in one area.
“Again, and not to sound like a broken record, you have to search and find the pockets that have higher salinity levels,” Schindler said. “Those areas will also hold more bait. One yields the other, because the smaller creatures like shrimp and glass minnows are naturally going to be drawn to the salty water. With a multi-boat guide service, it’s easy for us to keep track of those areas, because we’re out there every day the weather allows.
“But the weekend fishermen have to find it, too, and believe me, it’s worth the search. This year, it appears we’re going to have the advantage of the spillway pushing fish east again. It was open in March and still partially open into April, and that’s before the northern thaw, so there’s more water to come down the Mississippi.”
That will help increase the number of trout in Mississippi Sound and pack spawners around Cat Island and the other barrier islands further east — and don’t forget the front beaches along the coast line.
“Shoot, we’ve had more fish off the main beach the last few years,” said angler Jimmy Ladner of Long Beach. “I get up nearly every day of the full-moon cycles in April and May and wade off the beach and catch enough trout in an hour or two before work that we eat good at home for days. Last year, I caught an 8-pounder standing in just over knee-deep water on a D.O.A. Shrimp under a cork. I had it mounted.
“I caught a lot of other big females that I let go and still kept enough males and smaller females for my wife, two kids and I to eat, and even give some to friends.”
