The Outgoing Tide Is Carrying Dinner — Follow It

What's Biting: The spring transition is underway, and fish are feeding wherever bait gets pushed tight. In tidal water, striped bass, redfish, speckled trout, flounder, and schoolie bluefish are active around creek mouths, marsh drains, riprap, and shallow flats. Freshwater anglers are finding largemouth bass sliding toward spawning pockets, with smallmouth nosing into warming rock and gravel. The best window is usually the last hour of the outgoing tide into the first half-hour of slack. That is when the water has done the work of delivering breakfast.

The main event is fishing a suspending jerkbait or a small paddle-tail swimbait across the mouth of a draining creek. Start with a 3- to 4-inch bait in pearl, olive, or something that looks like a nervous little minnow having a very bad morning. Cast across the current, let the lure swing, and keep it moving just fast enough to avoid collecting every leaf in the county. On a strong outgoing tide, work the edge where clean water meets muddy water. Fish sit on the clean side and ambush whatever gets flushed out.

For bait guys, a live shrimp under a popping cork is hard to beat for trout and redfish. Put the hook 18 to 30 inches below the cork, depending on depth, and let the current carry it past grass points and creek drains. Striped bass want a chunk of fresh menhaden, a white bucktail tipped with pork or soft plastic, or a topwater plug right before daylight. The first light bite can be violent. After the sun gets up, go subsurface and stop pretending the fish are still interested in your noisy plastic toy.

A few springs back, I watched a kid catch his first redfish from the front of a skiff. He was maybe seven, wearing one of those oversized life jackets that turns a child into a floating mailbox. The fish ate a shrimp under a cork, ran under the boat, and wrapped the line around the anchor rope. His grandfather started giving orders, the father started giving different orders, and I started quietly moving the anchor. The kid ignored all of us, kept the rod low, and backed toward the console like he had been doing it for 40 years. We landed the fish. The boy kissed it, then asked if we could keep the cork. That was the only sensible request made on that boat all morning.

Dock Talk:

• Fish the tide, not the clock. If the outgoing current is weak, move until you find water actually moving.

• Keep one lure high and one low. A jerkbait finds active fish; a paddle-tail finds the ones sulking below them.

• Tactical advice: make your cast upstream of the drain and let the bait sweep naturally across the current. If you are cranking straight against the flow, you are fighting the river and feeding nobody.