Anglers must adapt to rare cold weather in South Florida to catch fish that migrate to warmer waters
Depending on the fish you pursue, cold fronts can be a curse or a blessing.
The recent cooler water temperatures can make bass stop biting and send bonefish and snook in search of warmer water. Meanwhile, sailfish and sea trout usually bite pretty well immediately after a cold front.
If you have the luxury of being able to time your fishing trips, you will want to wait a few days after a front before targeting largemouth bass.
When water temperatures are cool, bass become lethargic. As the water warms, bass become more active and, considering they haven’t eaten for a few days, usually feed heavily.
If you can only fish right after a cold front, the key is to not get discouraged. As long as you keep making casts, you will eventually put your lure in front of a bass that will bite.
It’s kind of like serving dessert to diners who just pigged out at an all-you-can-eat buffet. People will say they are stuffed, but keep putting that hot fudge sundae in front of their faces and eventually someone will dig in.
A standard cold-weather technique is to flip soft-plastic crawdad lures rigged on heavy jigs or with a hook and heavy worm weight in mats of thick grass, which is where bass hang out when water temperatures drop. Many tournaments have been won using that strategy, which might not produce a lot of bites, but the fish you catch are often big.
I recall a Bassmaster tournament on Lake Toho, south of Orlando, where most of the anglers figured that with dropping air and water temperatures, the fish would be tucked in the grass until the weather warmed. Their game plan was to flip or fish a plastic bait slowly to entice bass to bite.
Former Bassmaster Classic champ Takahiro Omori shocked the field, catching most of his fish by quickly reeling a lipless crankbait over grass beds to win the tournament. Instead of patiently flipping a crawfish through hyacinths, hydrilla and lily pads in the hopes of dropping it in front of a bass, Omori went for what the pros call a “reactionary” bite:
Make a lot of casts and retrieve a fast-moving lure quickly and eventually you’ll bring it past a bass that hits it more out of self-defense than anything else.
As a veteran bass fisherman once told me, bass don’t have hands, so when they see a lure coming at them, they bite it even if they’re not hungry.
Cool temperatures offshore prompt migratory species such as sailfish to swim to South Florida. When they get here, that doesn’t mean you can simply head offshore with live bait and catch all the sailfish you want.
Trends are important. Are the sailfish being caught in a few specific places each day or are they being caught a little farther south each day? If they were off Miami yesterday, they could be off Key Largo today, unless you know that they’ve been off Miami for three or four days.
Once you get to the general area where the sailfish should be, you want to look for clues as to their exact location. Color changes, where the water goes from green to blue, are a good place to start. Most anglers fish the pretty blue water on an edge, but the cloudy blue water often holds sailfish.
One of the most effective ways to catch a sailfish is by suspending a live bait from a fishing kite and having it splash on the surface, but many anglers neglect to cover the rest of the water column. In addition to deploying a couple of kite lines, put out one or two flat lines and a deep line.
When you do everything right, especially when sailfish are on the move, multiple hook-ups are common. If a sailfish comes up and eats a kite bait, keep an eye out on the other baits, because chances are another sailfish is around.
Cold weather can have a negative impact on reef fishing. Sediment settles to the bottom when the water is cold. The clear water means that yellowtail, mangrove and mutton snapper can see your fishing line when you drop down a bait and they’ll ignore your offering.
The fishing will improve when the water warms and the sediment makes the water cloudy. That reduces the visibility and makes the snapper more likely to bite.
