Veteran angler Josh Devlin of Florence said bream beds are easy to find on the Little Pee Dee River, and while he enjoys pulling out one bream after the other, he also makes sure not to fish them too hard.
Bobby Izard carries an arsenal of artificial lures with him when fishing for redbreast sunfish. While some anglers have their favorite lures that they stick to religiously, Izard thinks that’s a mistake.
The Johnson Beetle Spin is tough to beat when fishing for redbreast. Billy Garner of Ridgeville is a big fan of this lure, but he adds a little something to them this time of year: a live cricket.
Lake Marion anglers are fascinated by shellcrackers, aka redear sunfish, for a variety of reasons, size being one. For a species lumped in with a variety of sunfish collectively called “bream”, the shellcracker is a giant.
South Carolina’s cobia numbers have been on a roller-coaster over the past 10 years after a relatively stable recreational harvest through the 1980s and 1990s.
While cobia move into South Carolina’s inshore waters this month, they can still be caught at nearshore and offshore reefs, and anglers fishing those areas usually don’t have to fight the large crowd of boats that line up in St. Helena Sound, the Broad River, and similar inshore haunts.
While Buddy Bizzell usually prefers live or cut menhaden for cobia bait, he said cobia aren’t picky about what they eat. A number of other baits are good choices.
Cobia, rachycentron canadum, are a pelagic fish — they travel the open ocean — but unlike most pelagic species, cobia also inhabit inshore waterways like the Broad River and St. Helena Sound, at least for short periods of time.
The audacity of man to believe he can create a fishing bait better then God’s own hands never ceases to amaze die-hard, live-bait anglers, especially when speckled trout are concerned. With bait moving back into the estuaries, here’s your pick of the best live baits for big specks.
While most of you are humming that song from “The Lion King”, the circle of life for speckled trout begins in South Carolina marshes when two environmental factors signal mature trout that it’s time to get busy.
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