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April's Inshore Fishing for Pompano, Sheepshead, Redfish and Other Species with Captain Dennis Treigle at Orange Beach, Alabama

By: John Phillips

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Editor’s Note: Twenty-year charter-fishing veteran, Captain Dennis Treigle of FMF Charters, takes customers out in the “Find Me Fishing” charter boat, docked at Zeke’s Marina in Orange Beach, Alabama.

The number of inshore fishermen drastically has increased in Orange Beach, and this month, Perdido Pass, the jetties, the bridge and many of the docks inshore will start loading-up with fish. During April, the fishing will be really good.

A Vast Variety of April Fish:
We’ll have such a variety of fish coming inshore in April that it’s my favorite time to fish. We’ll primarily be using live bait, mostly shrimp, but we also will fish with some artificial lures this month. In April, targeting one species of fish is hard because the pompano will be in, sheepshead will be spawning heavily, and redfish will be here. We’ll also catch black drum, flounder and speckled trout. What really makes this month fun for fishing is you can catch all these species of fish at the same spot using the same bait. You never really know what you’ll catch when you fish inshore down here on Alabama’s Gulf Coast.

The speckled trout also will be in, but instead of fishing for them with a Carolina rig, we’ll fish live shrimp on a tight line, or we may add a small split shot just to help the shrimp get down in the water. Some guides will be using slip corks to keep their shrimp at certain depths, where they believe the trout will be holding. We catch a lot of speckled trout around the docks, in the bays, out in the pass, along the jetties, around the bridge and on any points around the islands where there’s tidal flow and a back eddy.

May is generally the best month for catching flounder, but the flounder are starting to trickle down this month. Flounder fishing will continue to get better toward the end of April. This month, there will be a lot of people fishing on the jetties, and there’s not a bad place to fish along the rocks. You may be sitting 10 feet from another fisherman who’s catching fish on every cast, and you’re not, or you may be catching fish on every cast, and he’s not catching anything. The fish will really pile-up in a particular spot during April. The problem is you never know where they’ll be. You can catch plenty of fish in one place one day and return to that same site the next day, but someone fishing 50 yards from you may be catching them that day.

Pompano - the Glamour Fish:
For the inshore fisherman, the pompano is a glamour fish. Sand fleas are your best baits, but live shrimp are also good baits. One of the biggest mistakes most pompano fishermen make is they use the biggest shrimp they can find to try to catch the pompano and the sheepshead. However, medium to small live shrimp are much better for pompano and sheepshead, because both these fish have small mouths and take small baits. So, you’ll catch far-more pompano and sheepshead on medium- and small-sized shrimp than you do on bigger shrimp. Ten- to 20-pound-test line will be best with the majority of anglers fishing 16-pound-test line.

When a live shrimp hits the water in April at Alabama’s Gulf Coast, it’s inviting redfish, speckled trout, flounder, pompano, sheepshead and just about any fish that swims there to dinner. But that’s what makes the month of April such good fishing. We generally can always go out and catch a good variety of hard-fighting, fun-eating, inshore fish this month.

To fish with Captain Dennis Treigle at FMF Charters, visit www.fmfcharters.com, call 850-221-7732, or email Captain Treigle at fmfcharters@yahoo.com.

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