The Best Baitfish For Inshore Fishing & How To Match The Hatch
- By: Joseph Simonds
- on September 2, 2021
Regardless if you fish with live bait or lures, you’ve got to know where and what baitfish are in your area.
In this episode, we hammer home why it’s critical to know what types of live bait are in your area (for each season), where to find the baitfish, and how to match the hatch in order to catch more fish.
This will be incredibly helpful for both live bait anglers and artificial lure anglers (especially if you love catching redfish, trout, snook, and flounder).
Check it out below!
You can watch the video version of this podcast below (which I highly recommend), listen to the audio version by clicking the play button underneath it, or listen to it on iTunes, Stitcher, or Spotify.
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Best Baits & How To Find Them [VIDEO]
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Best Baits & How To Find Them [PODCAST]
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You can follow the timestamped table of contents:
- 1:34 – There’s a time & place to use live bait
- 3:09 – SHRIMP! Everything eats shrimp
- 4:08 – The Mullet Run is the most wonderful time of the year
- 5:25 – What eats mullet?
- 6:36 – Mud minnows: where are they and what fish species love them
- 8:31 – The best live bait to use to catch a ton of fish
- 11:12 – What’s the money bait in the area you’re fishing?
- 13:12 – Mullet, pinfish, croakers, pilchard (white bait)
- 14:23 – Without a cast net, how do you catch live bait?
- 15:17 – The Slam Shady Bomber mimics this
- 15:31 – Slam Shady 2.0 and Gold Digger will catch doormats
- 16:41 – Best Wintertime bait and why
- 19:15 – Is there a best Springtime bait and why?
- 21:43 – If you want to catch baitfish without a cast net, do this
- 24:46 – Shad is the predominate bait over in Texas during Spring
- 27:28 – Best Summertime baitfish, hands down
- 29:39 – The $9 baitfish…
- 32:18 – Buy your bait or go find your bait?
- 33:03 – Fall is here, what baitfish are you using (dead or alive)
- 37:08 – Regional bait names
- 38:37 – Using mullet to catch big tarpon
- 40:02 – Blue crabs for HUGE reds during fall
- 43:56 – The lures for catching big redfish in schools
- 47:28 – Match the hatch with your lures by season
Check out the course mentioned here:
Here are the lures mentioned:
And here are some other tactics for catching live bait:
Conclusion
If you love to fish inshore year-round, then you need to know what baits are present by season, how to find them, and the best ways to match the hatch!
Have any questions about what lures to use to match the hatch?
Any other topics you’d like us to cover on live bait?
Let me know down in the comments!
And if you know an angler who loves to use live bait, please TAG or SHARE this with them!
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Ah, you left out ladyfish. Great cut bait or whole for the big Ones.
Excellent video. I found it much more informative than the fishing course on live bait.
Type of live bait makes a difference for certain. My best friend and I fished an area and I was using a slam shady and caught a few trout. He used menhaden and caught multiple reds but when he switched to finger mullet he caught big trout.
It would be nice to have a pod cast like this on how and where to fibd live bait.
Great video guys! A bunch of really great information here!
I just went back and checked both of Cpt Deeks’ courses (using and catching bait) and he never mentions croaker – possibly he’s fishing south of their range. Or is what he calls a “pigfish” a croaker?
Different species. Pigfish — Texas Parks & Wildlife Department
Watched, learned! What lures were shown during the video portion for mullet. You don’t have any on your site
Hey Joe/Wyatt,
I’ll forward an email you that I sent to Luke a while back.
Just a couple other comments:
On the Texas Upper Coast, shrimp are hard to come by in the winter. Big baits like mullet actually work best, along with crab.
Around here, you can catch shrimp on some beaches in the summer time, and around grass on bay marsh edges. You have to be careful though because there are legal restrictions on location and time of year. Many marsh areas are consider “nursery” areas and are off-limits.
Lastly, we have lots of threadfin and gizzard shad here (have a small dot). Large ones can actually be good bait for gator trout. A friend of mine actually found 8″ gizzard shad in a large trout he harvested.
Only time I ever paid for bait is day I started out late and was headed offshore.
The day I pay $9 for a pogey, is the day I need to be admitted to a mental health institution.
Hahaha. I hear ya! The reference to the $9 was for a croaker (I hope nobody ever pays $9 for one pogey).