With weather fronts moving rapidly along the coast during the late winter and spring, sea conditions just do not allow heading offshore every day.
Most people would agree the best information on where to catch fish is knowing where they were caught recently, but another part of the fishing puzzle is knowing what the ocean is doing. Various currents wander along the North Carolina coast — of which the Gulf Stream is the primary one — and they push and tug on pods of warmer or cooler water, moving them up and down the coast. Knowing this and how it relates to your fishing area can make the difference between finding and catching fish or just taking a long boat ride.
Most offshore charter captains employ some sort of ocean-analysis service, some say to locate fishy areas and avoid areas that won’t be holding fish. Roffers Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service (ROFFS) is the oldest and best known of the services that use satellite imaging to analyze the ocean. Some fishermen make the mistake of thinking this is only plotting the ocean surface temperatures, but it involves far more than that.
ROFFS (www.roffs.com) was started in 1987 by Dr. Mitchell Roffer and operates today from West Melbourne and Miami, Fla. An analysis from ROFFS incorporates water temperature and color, orientation of local currents, history of ocean fronts, bottom topography, biological quality of the water, forage preference of the target species, availability of forage, as well as habitat preference of the forage and target species.
Charter captains know their waters well, and when paired with an analysis service, they can produce amazingly consistent results. Knowing where the best conditions and large baitfish concentrations were a few hours before leaving on a trip allows fishermen an easy choice of where to fish.
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