Wando River full of hungry sea trout, Summerville Saltwater Anglers Club members find.
When Ralph Phillips of Summerville and brother Dan of Columbia headed to the Wando River last Wednesday (Sept. 14), they didn’t expect to have their best trout-fishing day in quite a while.
“This is the first big trout bite I’ve had this year,” Phillips said. “It really surprised me. We were catching numbers and quality after a long dry spell; that surprised me.”
Fishing around shallow grass beds, the Phillips brothers wound up catching 34 specks – 31 of them on two top-water baits.
Ralph Phillips was throwing a Rapala Skitterwalk, and Dan Phillips was fishing a Zara Spook. The specks loved them both – as long as there was cloud cover.
“It was one of those days when we had some cloud cover,” Ralph Phillips said. “Every time (the sun) went behind the clouds, the trout would light up those top-water baits.”
The Phillips caught three 25-inch redfish, but it was the size and number of the specks that was a revelation, especially just eight months after cold-stun winter kills did a number on South Carolina’s trout population, causing the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources to ask that fishermen practice catch-and-release on specks at least through the summer, to allow fish that survived last winter to spawn.
“We had six that were about 3 pounds,” Ralph Phillips said. “The rest of them were probably 14 to 16 inches. We had a lot of strikes where fish didn’t get hooked up, and we figured those were smaller trout.”
The Phillips brothers released all the trout they caught alive, a practice Ralph Phillips has stuck to this year.
The Summerville Saltwater Anglers Club, of which Ralph Phillips is the president, has not weighed any trout as part of its monthly tournaments in this, its first year, opting to weigh, measure, photograph and release all specks.
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