Ask me what’s my favorite month to fish in the lowcountry of South Carolina and I will tell you without hesitation…November. Bait is pushing out of the estuaries and the fish are starting to panic a little bit. That’s awesome for us artificial bait aficionados. It makes for stupid good fishing pretty much everywhere.
On 11/2 I made a solo trip and stumbled upon one of the best topwater bites ever for me. That’s kinda saying something because I love me some topwater fishing! I found a broken grass line where some finger mullet were gathering and you could see them getting blasted periodically. I had tied on a Skitter V, a plug we recently heard about through our friend Daniel Nussbaum – President of Z-Man Fishing. It was my first time trying it, and the fish really killed it.
There are a couple small annoyances about this plug. One being that the front hook is kind of close to the nose so it often gets wrapped around the leader. Another is that you need to kind of finesse it into it’s cadence. It will sometimes act as though its wrapped up but its not. Just needs to get in the rhythm. Once going, it has a little wider walk-the-dog pattern and what really matters is the fish were charging it hard. I’ll put up with the annoyances for a plug that works any day!
So anyway, this morning the trout bite was on fire from pre-dawn until the sun was high enough to lighten up the water. Good trout too, 16″ – 20″ all of them. Don’t know about you but when I’m by myself I talk to myself a lot. Several times I found myself saying “no way!” or “oh my god that was awesome!”.
A few highlights:
- Caught a “Zombie Trout” with one eye that still was able to charge my plug.
- Had a trout knock the plug out of the water 3 times before a redfish pushed him out of the way and took it.
- A nice size trout came up in clear water pushing a big wake, whacked the plug, then took off to the side. Never did get that one but what a cool site.
I ended up with almost a Margarita Slam. Had redfish, trout, flounder, striper, so I went way up river to try to find a largemouth bass but ran out of time before I had to give up.
Evidence of the great catching to be had in November. Now is the time to get out there!
In other news:
We are almost completely out of Original Trout Tricks. We bought out Z-Man of their entire remaining inventory and we have exactly 380 of them left. They can be purchased on our online store or here at the shop. At this point there are no plans to make any more.