Newsletter - Page 930 of 2139 - Carolina Sportsman

Before new regulations took effect in June, all of these Santee Cooper stripers would have been illegal to keep.

New Santee striper regs are popular

The new striper regulations implemented on the Santee Cooper lakes this past June have received rave reviews from fishermen, guides and landing operators around Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie. This has created a lot of optimism for the striper fishing season that reopens Oct. 1. […]

High water caused by heavy rains often turns high spots in low-lying areas into islands that will fill up with wildlife.

Island delights

Jeff Burleson

Rivers and streams along the coastal plain and in the larger watersheds of the Piedmont and Midlands areas will have high hills within the river corridors, and these hills don’t always flood when everything else in the area is inundated. […]

When is the peak of the rut in the Carolinas? It’s complicated

Craig Holt

Conventional wisdom aside, when a dominant buck corrals an estrous doe, he quits chasing for several days. That’s why wall-hanger bucks may disappear during the peak of the rut, making a hunter’s best-laid plans often go awry. […]

Targeting flounder while wading allowed the author to concentrate on a good-looking area and catch this fish.

Catch more flounder by wade fishing

Phillip Gentry

Wading is a great tactic when targeting flounder, but it is often overlooked by east coast anglers. […]

Giving a flounder time to grab a bait and get it ready to slide down its throat will usually result in a good hookset.

How to hook a flounder

Phillip Gentry

Flounder are gregarious fish. If they bit like redfish, you’d regularly see a lot more flounder in magazines and on social media. […]

Tony Rhodes gigged this flounder in the New River near Sneads Ferry, N.C.

It’s an all-night gig

Mike Marsh

It is not often that a recreational trip to procure fish begins well after dark. However, guide Allen Jernigan met a friend, Tony Rhodes, at a ramp in Sneads Ferry, N.C., at 9:30 p.m. […]

Suspending a live shrimp beneath a popping cork is a tried-and-true trout-catching tactic.

Shrimp rigs for trout

Phillip Gentry

Like skinning a cat, there is more than one way to rig a live shrimp to catch speckled trout. The old standby is a length of leader beneath a stemmed popping cork, sometimes referred to as a rattling cork. Even with a popping cork, some anglers prefer to use a standard J-hook, while other may opt for a Kahle hook or circle hook and still others a jighead. […]

Five shrimp tricks to try on trout

Phillip Gentry

Speckled trout eat shrimp throughout their life, starting as fry and continuing through the gator years.
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Kevin Davis has weighed in plenty of huge blue catfish on the scales at his business, Blacks Camp.

Trophy cats: a biological perspective

Terry Madewell

Chad Holbrook, a fisheries biologist for the S.C. Department of Natural Resources who oversees the Santee Cooper lakes, said biologists use winter gill-net sampling to assess blue catfish populations and, the data shows increasing catch rates from 2016 through 2018. […]

The Santee Cooper lakes have been producing trophy blue, channel and flathead catfish for more than 50 years.

A long-time trophy fishery

Terry Madewell

A 58-pound channel catfish was caught from Lake Moultrie in 1964, setting state and world records that still stand today. While the Santee Cooper lakes provide excellent fishing for numbers of channel catfish, the sizes are no longer extreme and are not typically considered trophy size, even for channel catfish. […]