You’re not likely to catch any “puppy drum” or “rat reds” on the shoals and sandbars at the mouth of Bulls Bay in the fall — and it’s not because numbers are down in the spartina grass and oyster bars of the sprawling bay’s marshes.
It’s the life cycle of the red drum, aka channel bass or redfish, that puts big, mature fish out on the edge of the ocean in the fall.
They’re the only ones out there — for a reason.
Redfish spawn on hard-bottomed areas inside harbors, bays and coastal rivers, typically in late summer and early fall. Hatchlings and fingerlings spend their first year in nursery areas in coastal estuaries. At 14 inches, entering their second autumn, they typically move out into bigger water in the same estuary areas — creeks, rivers, the ICW. They’ll stay there, their diet changing from mostly small crustaceans to fish, growing about 1¼ inches per month.
At about six years of age, having broken through the 30-inch mark, they become sexually mature and leave the protected inshore areas. As the water cools in the fall, they make their way out into the ocean, where they overwinter around inshore wrecks and reefs. When the water warms back up in late spring, they move back in to begin the spawning cycle.
Most of the fish that stack up on the sandbars and shoals outside of Bulls Bay in the fall are adults heading back out into the ocean. The smaller fish will overwinter in inshore creeks and marshes, ganging up in huge schools for protection from the bottlenosed dolphin that patrol those areas, waiting to make an afternoon snack out of a 14-inch redfish.
Editor’s note: This article is part of the Bulls and bars feature in the October issue of South Carolina Sportsman. Digital editions can be downloaded right to your computer or smartphone.
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