44 Mississippi Sportsman^ | April 2015
Baitfish bonanza
Ours was the first boat there shortly after sunrise, and we
were already well on the way to filling our fish box with nice
speckled trout and the occasional drag-peeling redfish.
Then we saw a line of boats coming.
“Here they come,” said Tommy Sutton, who was standing on
the front deck of his 22-foot Blazer Bay boat, his foot on the
trolling motor. “Look at them — one, two, three and there’s a
fourth boat — coming straight at us.”
Sutton wasn’t surprised.
“That’s typical for April in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “Where
you find baitfish you will find gamefish, and, obviously, where
you find specks and reds you will find fishermen.
“It’s about to get crowded up in here.”
Soon there were five boats in the half-mile-long, shallow, clear
and fish-filled waters of the bay off Bob’s Bayou. Fortunately,the area held enough fish and had enough room for all to stay
busy with bent rods.
Being first there, we cherry-picked the prime spot just off a
point where the marsh bank made a 90-degree turn. We poled
down and Sutton had his boat perfectly positioned for us to fish
both banks beyond the point, offering us shots at the schools of
trout just offshore and reds on the grass line.
“Look at that: You can see the boils of fish in the water,” our
captain said. “You can actually see the trout feeding. When theymove on baitfish, they churn up the bottom. You don’t have to
look for the bait; just look for the mud boils.”
With simple 3/16-ounce lead jigheads with soft-plastic cocahoe
minnow grubs in a clear body with red and blue glitter — a pat-
tern called firecracker — we were getting a nice speck on every
cast, when we could throw right into a spot with a fresh mud
boil.
You learned real quickly, too, to differentiate mud boils. A cast
into a sudden boil that created a huge cloud, meant spend-
ing 20 to 30 minutes fighting a bull redfish on the light tackle.
Smaller and multiple boils in an area usually meant trout, and
if one guy hooked up anyone throwing in behind him could
expect to be bitten.
Hooking up with a bull red created problems, beginning with
the obvious of lost fishing time for the “unfortunate” angler.
A particularly strong fish could swim
through lines of other boats and create
an even bigger mess.
We also spotted several schools of
slot reds cruising the banks, and a cast
along the edge of the grass near the
point was about automatic.
It was that good, and it was clear why.
Every fish that hit the deck of Sutton’s
boat brought with it evidence of why
the action was so fast and furious
when it would regurgitate small min-
nows either on the deck or in the water
beside the boat.
“Glass minnows — they’re so full of
glass minnows that it’s a wonder they’d
hit a lure,” one of our partners fishing
between me and Sutton said. “It’s get-
ting pretty slick down here, so be care-
ful when you step down. There’s scores
of those minnows down here.”
That was the key to the action and
why there would eventually be eight boats, including several
charter captains from both Mississippi and Louisiana ports, in
that one small area.
“Glass minnow” is one of the nicknames for the common bay
anchovy found in the Gulf of Mexico. Bay anchovy is an impor-
tant baitfish, and its ability to spawn early is why millions of
them were in the area that April day. They can spawn in 65- to
70-degree water, cooler than that needed for most small prey.
“That’s an important part of finding fish in April,” said JohnnyWord had obviously spread about the huge
schools of baitfish congregated in one bay in the heart
of the Biloxi Marsh, about six miles south of Waveland.
Bobby Cleveland