Sidebars

Shrimp rigs for trout

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. […]

Catfish

Trophy cats: a biological perspective

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. […]

Catfish

A long-time trophy fishery

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. […]

Deer Hunting

Island delights

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.  […]

Columns

Size does matter! Know your plot

It’s that time again: for cooler weather, changing colors and the approach of the whitetail rut. While some hunters get an early start in August and September to fulfill their food-plot dreams, the majority start tilling up the dirt in early October. It’s a busy season for hunters looking to quickly establish a field of greens, because their prime hunting days are eminently approaching. […]