It’s time to clean the dust off those topwater plugs that have been sitting in your tackle box all winter. But before you use them make sure all the split rings and hooks are in good shape. Any defective hooks or split rings can easily be changed with the aid of split ring pliers. The pliers can be purchased for a couple of dollars through any of the major catalog suppliers such as Cables or Bass Pro Shops. They also carry replacement hooks and split rings. This small investment is a lot cheaper than buying new lures whenever something goes wrong with a lure. I even carry some replacement parts on the boat should something go wrong with one of my favorite lures. Now that you have your tackle in order it’s time to take it out and start using it.
I’ll usually start my day out around the crack of dawn casting a topwater or a sub surface lure until around 9AM. If it’s a cloudy day I’ll use it throughout the day. (Sub surface lures will swim just below the surface.) Let me regress for a second and tell you that when you buy an artificial lure to read the instructions on the box. It will give you ways to work the lure to make it more affective to entice a fish into eating it. I can tell you, and almost all fishermen will agree with me, that there is nothing more exciting in the world of fishing than watching a fish come up and exploding on a topwater bait. Second to that is watching a fish come out of nowhere to eat a sub surface lure. Also the time just before and at dusk is another good time to fish these lures.
Some of my favorite topwater lures are the MirrOlure Top Dog Jr., High Rollers Rip Roller and the Zarra Spook Puppy. When it comes to subsurface lures my all time favorite is the MirrOlure 17MR and their 7M series of lures. The 17MR and the 7M also work great during the middle of the day.
When it comes to fly fishing I also like to start the day with a floating fly line and a topwater fly or a lightly weighted fly (sub surface). While fishing the other morning I was casting a white subsurface fly that you could see 50 feet from the boat and follow it under the surface. It was very exciting to watch trout appear from know where to eat the fly and watch others come up to it, look at it and just swim away.
We’ve been having some great weather so get out and wet a line.

The new regulations for spotted sea trout and redfish are now in effect. The bag limit for trout is now six per person per day. The size limits remain the same at 15” to 20” and one of those fish can be over 20”. There is no more closed season on trout. The bag limit for redfish is now two per person per day with a maximum of 8 fish per vessel. In other words if you have 6 people on your vessel you are only allowed 8 redfish.
These new regulations are for the northeast and northwest sections of the state. The northeast section goes from the Volusia/Flagler county line north to the Georgia border. If you launch your boat at the Highbridge boat launch and fish in Flagler County you cannot bring back the northeast limits on fish back to Highbridge. You can only have the limits for the Southern region. If the FWC checks you at the ramp and you have the wrong limits you will be fined. If you have any questions about the new regulations you can go to “my fwc.com” for further information.
Snook season is also open now and the size limits on snook are 28” to 32” with a bag limit of 1 per day per person. You must have a snook stamp to possess snook.
Remember that when you measure fish that have a broad tail like that of redfish, trout or snook you have to squeeze the tail when measuring them. That’s the way the FWC wil measure them if you get checked.
I know the snook fishing hasn’t been good in our area since the Big Freeze of a couple of years ago but I’ve been seeing signs that the fishery is on the rebound. I’ve been getting rports of people catching lots of little ones in there cast nets. And since the water has been warming up I’ve started to catch small ones again using flies. There are also reports of some decent size snook coming from the Tamoka River.
The big redfish schools that were in the Pellicer flats seem to have dissipated with the onset of warmer water. You can still find reds just not in the big schools that were there a month ago.
Trout fishing remains steady but they also seem to be more spread out due to the warmer water.
There’s also been some good size flounder picked up in the flats using Berkley Gulp. I even caught a flounder while trolling a fly down a canal against the wind.
Access to the flats should be a little easier now that the northeast wind has pushed some water back into the area.