Catch more flounder by wade fishing

Wading is popular in Gulf Coast states, but less so in the Carolinas

If you Google “wade fishing for flounder,” you’ll get a bunch of YouTube videos from Texas, Louisiana and other spots along the Gulf Coast. On the East coast, wading is much more of a personal preference than an advantage. That’s because of the amount of water that ebbs and flows between tide cycles and that sticky stuff that’s been rumored to hold the world together: pluff mud. Gulf Coast states don’t have the extreme tide cycles we have here, but that doesn’t mean wading isn’t a good option for us.

In practice, wading for flounder is a more than productive endeavor. That’s especially true if you focus on areas with more of a sandy or shell bottom.

South Carolina offers great wading opportunities, especially the northern areas of  the coast. Many people are accustomed to covering more ground in a boat. But wading allows you to slow down and thoroughly work an area that might hold multiple flounder.

Find one flounder, and you’ll likely find more

Flounder, like many other fish species, tend to “school” together by size. Find an area that’s attractive to one fish, and more often than not, you’ll find multiple fish. Something, usually food, draws them to the same area. Be on the lookout for a drain, ditch or other bottom contour that funnels food into an ambush area.

Live baits tend to get the nod when targeting flounder from a boat. But wading will relegate an angler to picking a handful of artificial baits to cast to areas holding flounder. During the fall, soft-plastic lures that imitate both shrimp and baitfish catch flounder. But some of the more-overlooked and productive lures for flounder are hard-plastic stickbaits.

The appeal of the hard stickbait, or any crankbait used for flounder, is that waiting to set the hook is a non-issue. Working a crankbait with a bill that digs through the sandy bottom is akin to ringing the dinner bell for flounder. Just be sure that when the fish grabs the bait, you stick a treble hook in him.

Click here for tips on wade-fishing along North Carolina’s southern coast.