Speckled trout abound in Little River area

Guide Mark Dickson figures that South Carolina fishermen are really reaping the benefits of a couple of recent mild winters. At least Dickson is.

He’s been putting his Shallow Water Guide Service parties on an awful lot of speckled trout in the Little River area over the past two weeks. He’s gotten to where he’s going to places he’s never caught fish before and getting good hookups.

“I think when we have a couple of mild winters in a row, we’ll see really, really good trout fishing the next year or two,” said Dickson (843-280-7099). “I think that’s what’s happening now.”

Dickson said that because the summer has been extremely dry, there hasn’t been a lot of freshwater influx into coastal rivers and sounds, so shrimp are moving upstream – and trout are following.

“They have been everywhere,” he said. “You can just throw up to a marsh bank and let it drift down the bank and you’ll catch fish. And the salinity levels have been so high, because we haven’t had much freshwater coming down, that you can go way back off the ICW and catch fish. I’ve been catching shrimp off the dock in the my marina, and that’s unheard of.”

Dickson has been floating live shrimp under a 7-inch Lindy float or a Bayside Rattlin’ Cork. He keeps his leader short enough to keep the shrimp off the bottom, and he’s been floating shrimp around the mouth of ditches, drains or small creek. Trout are working around the mouths of those creeks, picking off shrimp as the falling tide pulls them out of the marsh grass.