Tips | Salt Water Fishing | Salt Water Fishing Tips, Articles and How-To-Guides

Spring Cleaning Your Fishing Equipment

Here’s a simple checklist for getting your fishing gear ready and in top condition for the open-water season!

Tackle Maintenance Tips

I can’t fish with a reel that sounds and feels like it’s full of sand, or
with beat up rods whose guides are missing inserts or are otherwise bent and
broken. Since I’m not fishing for dinner, the reason to be on the water is to
enjoy it — working equipment adds to the pleasure of the experience. Here’s how to keep your gear in working order.

Fall Maintenance: Get Your Boat Clean!

Many anglers and recreational boaters are pulling their boats out of the water and getting them ready to store for the winter after a summer on the water. This is the time to clean it up, clean the crud from the outside of the hull, check for signs of wear at critical
mechanical and electrical junctures, and get rid of the fishy or mildew smell that can build up in the bilge. Here’s how to get it done.

Big Speckled Trout Like Cover

To find big speckled trout, lose the crowds, fish odd hours and go during the week when it’s less busy.

Sight-Casting To Cunning Tripletails

Anglers don’t usually associate sight-fishing with the deep water offshore, but keeping an eye (and a crab or shrimp) peeled can put more tripletails in the boat. Also called blackfish, tripletail range throughout the warm waters of the world. Looking something like a dark brown bluegill on bad steroids, tripletail can exceed 40 pounds!

Flyrodding For Jacks

If there is a better fish than crevalle jack to
learn big fish fighting technique with a fly rod, I need to know what that
species is and where you find it. Few fish are more willing to strike anything
you put in front of them, and on a pound-for-pound basis, few pull harder.

Atlantic Coast Fishing: Casting To Cobia On Structure

One of the most exciting inshore fishing opportunities available to Mid-Atlantic anglers is casting to cobia cruising around buoys, markers, jetties and other structures. It’s fun because cobia get big, as in 25- to 70 pounds (maybe “huge” is a better word), and anglers who know where to look can see cobia, which provides thrilling sight-casting action!

A Quick Guide To Freezing Bait

Most bait fishermen prefer to fish with live stuff. That’s
understandable when it’s abundant and easy to catch, but when it becomes scarce in the winter months, I seldom bother trying to net bait. Instead I simply pull it out of the freezer.

Soft-Plastic Stickbait Tips For Smallmouth Bass

There’s nothing fancy in the design of a soft-plastic stickbait, but its
fish-catching ability is far from ordinary. On days when finesse tactics are
what’s catching fish, a Senko or similar style stickbait is one of a handful of
lures I’ll rely on to coax smallies into biting. Here are some tips on fishing
the simple, but effective soft plastics known as stickbaits.