The plan was flounder, but the Gulf Shores surf had other ideas. Working a beach cart down to the water at first light, the angler behind The Surf Fishing Guy set out hunting flatfish early before switching to pompano — and instead ran headlong into a pack of speckled trout.
Conditions, he noted, were close to ideal: a little chop on the water, which surf anglers want, especially for pompano. Casting a small three-inch swimbait and slow-rolling it just off the bottom for flounder, he hooked a solid trout almost immediately — and then spotted the school behind it. "Look at the trout. There's trout with him, guys... there are tons of them," he said as fish trailed the hooked one to the sand. The first measured a touch under 18 inches and went straight in the ice chest.
The key read came on the next drop. After a swiped bait and a fish slashing on the surface, he realised the trout were feeding high in the water column rather than on the bottom where he had been working. He sped the retrieve up, kept the bait near the top, and connected with an even bigger fish around 19 inches. His advice for these flurries is to strike while the iron is hot: "Anytime you see a fish coming up to the surface and eating, you need to catch them then. Because these fish will not eat all morning." Sure enough, the bite died minutes after his second keeper.
With the trout switched off, he turned back to flounder, working the edges of the drop-offs where they ambush, and pulled one that fell about half an inch short of legal before swimming off. To fish two zones at once, he set a pompano rig in a rod holder while he cast for flatfish — a three-ounce Sputnik sinker pinning a sand flea, waded out past a far sand bar to reach cleaner water. Mid-tangle with a neighbouring angler's line, that rod started thumping, and he landed a chunky pompano just shy of 17 inches that had jumped repeatedly on the way in.
Like the trout, the pompano stopped biting almost as soon as it started. But a return trip the following day, in rough and rainy conditions most anglers would skip, produced a bonus: another big, beautiful speckled trout that ate a popped jig in churned-up water. "It's been raining, it's been nasty, I've been sticking it out," he said. "That was well worth it." The takeaway from two mornings of fast, fleeting bites is a familiar one in the surf — read where the fish are feeding, get your bait there quickly, and cash in while the window is open.
