Oldfield guide says go small, be precise, stay focused
March Madness is normally great if you’re a college basketball fan. Unfortunately, that’s not the case this year. But if you’re a fisherman who likes to target redfish, the madness of March is trying to figure out how to get fish that have been hammered on by anglers and dolphin for three or four months to even look at a bait or lure.
“March and April are the months when reds are spooky,” said guide Charlie Beadon of Oldfield Outfitters at the Oldfield Club in Okatie.
Swimming in schools that often number in the hundreds, and up on shallow flats where their main predator, dolphin, can’t follow, they’ve seen just about every lure made and would rather run and hide than come out and play.
That’s a problem for guides like Beadon. He’s got to produce fish for his parties, fish that aren’t too scared to bite.
“There’s not a lot you can do when they’re real spooky,” said Beadon (843-645-4604), who does most of his fishing on the Okatie and Chechessee rivers. “The prescription is to stay tenacious, but a lot of fishermen get frustrated and stop really making good cats and trying hard.
It’s a numbers game
“You’ve got to stay focused and make really good presentations. It’s a numbers game. You might get to make a presentation in front of 20 fish, and if you can find one that’s hungry, it works out. But if you get slack and don’t make good presentations, you might only get to make presentations to five fish, so you don’t get as many good shots.”
Beadon likes to get up on a big tidal flat he knows reds are using and slowly pole along, looking for signs of reds – water being “pushed” by dozens of fish, maybe a stray baitfish or two fleeing, birds picking, anything that might indicate life under the surface.
He tries to position his boat to intercept schools headed roughly in his direction, hoping for a school to cross his path at about a 45-degree angle and stopping way short, jamming his Power Pole down into the mud bottom when fish are a hundred yards away.
Beadon prefers fishing artificial baits, especially soft plastics and flies. He tries to get his fishermen to cast in the redfish’s path, leading the school by at least 20 to 25 feet, letting the bait sink to the bottom, then twitching it gently when the school reaches it.
It works, sometimes, but when it doesn’t, all is not lost
Often, that isn’t enough, and fish will spook at the splash of the lure on the water’s surface. If fish prove to be that spooky, he’ll go to live bait, usually mud minnows, fishing them under a popping cork and getting the baits in the water when a school is much farther away, letting the baits soak until the fish cruise past.
“The spookier they are, the farther you need to lead them, because a lot of time, it’s the splash that spooks ‘em,” Beadon said. “Ideally, if you’re working a school, you don’t want them to come right to you, because they’ll spook when they see the boat. You want to get them tracking toward you at an angle, but that’s not always possible. The thing about fishing live bait is, if you can get it in the water a long time before they come by, you don’t have the splash to spooky them.”
Beadon’s last trick involves what he puts in front of the fish.
“A lot of times, people don’t realize that when reds get spooky, they’re more efficient. You need to fish smaller baits and make them more natural. That’s why fly-fishing can be so effective,” he said.
“You go with a lighter leader; I’ll use 10-pound Power Pro braid. I recognize that people want to use 15-, but they aren’t gonna break that many off, so 10- will work. And I’ll go to smaller baits. We’ll go from a 4-inch to a 3-inch Gulp! shrimp. A lot of times they’ll eat that one better.”
Long casts are a big plus for spooky redfish
Beadon will fish soft-plastics either on a jighead, a flutter hook or weightless, depending on the length of the casts needed.
“A lot of people, when the fish get spooky, they’ll cast short,” he said. “The longer a cast you can make, the better chance you have of catching one. If you cast past where the fish are going to cross, you can bring the bait back and drop it. But if you cast short, you won’t get it to them.”
The best thing about spooky reds, Beadon said, is that they usually aren’t spooky too long. When the water temperature moves up into the 60s, baitfish will return to the estuaries, and the pressure from dolphin will largely be taken off. The huge winter schools will break up into much smaller pods, taking away the problem of having one over-cautious fish spooking a school of 100 fish.
“When the live bait starts firing off, the reds will break up and spread out in smaller schools. When they’re in the big schools, they’re in their fight-or-flight mode,” he said. “The mullet showed up here a week ago, and the numbers have quadrupled in the last day or so. Hopefully this warm front will drive them into a spring pattern and put them out on the points and (sand) bars.”
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