Fish like grass. Not to eat. They’re not cows. But they do find things to eat around the grass.
All the types of creatures that predatory fish like to munch on will be found around grass. The key is to know what kind you are looking at, what kind of fish will be found around it, how they use it, what they are eating, and when they’ll be doing it.
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Let’s start inshore and work our way out.
The first type of grass we’ll see in a day is spartina. Pronounce it “spart-eye-na.” It’s a species of cordgrass and it’s all around the inshore marshy areas. You’ll see it growing around marinas, along the roadside, and basically anywhere the water meets the land. Biologists know that it stabilizes shorelines from erosion and creates habitats for millions of small fish and crustaceans. This last part is what is important to us.
Find a creek that meanders back into the marsh. The bottom inside the creek channel will be very mushy. On both sides of that creek will be tall stands of grass that are usually green on top grading to brown or beige at the base. Behind the tall stands will be flats with shorter grass growing on them. All of that is spartina. At low tide, take a look at the areas of short grass growing behind the channel. There’ll be millions of fiddler crabs there. Look around you in the channel. Small fish will be flipping around almost everywhere. Most of these will be mullet. But there will also be the young of spots and other species. Then you add shrimp to this mixture, and you have a veritable living bouillabaisse.
Cold-weather months will see speckled trout in the spartina creeks as they move in from the open water. They will feast on anything they can find. Some days in December and January, large schools of trout or reds will be in the creek that you drive past every day. You can catch them on slow-moving lures such as suspending plugs and soft plastics on lightweight jigs. If the water is deeper or there is more current, use heavier-weighted lures.
As the water gets warmer, expect red drum to be in the same places you caught the trout when it was cold. Popping corks with a plastic shrimp suspended under them will get yanked under on a regular basis when fished with a pop-pause-pop-pause cadence.
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As we move out of the marshes and into the sounds we find the seagrass flats. These areas, referred to as “meadows” by the people who study them, grow in areas of higher salinity, clearer water and lower turbulence. Once again you will find an entire variety of aquatic life in these vast ecosystems. Some of these flats extend for miles. Every inch is covered with some life form or another. Crabs and shrimp are present everywhere. Pinfish and small croaker as well. All varieties of small bait fish species from mullet to silversides and bay anchovies will use the grass flats.
When fishing some of my favorite seagrass flats in the summer, I have caught red drum, speckled trout, bluefish, ladyfish, blacktip sharks, pompano, houndfish, and I am pretty sure a bull shark stole my lure off my line one time.
I like to use lures like topwater plugs, unweighted soft plastic jerk baits, shallow-running plugs, and even gold spoons. Keep an eye out, wear polarized sunglasses and a long-bill cap. You never know what you will see because the water is quite a bit clearer than you find in the spartina marshes. You’ll need a shallow-draft skiff to even get to some of these spots.
Even then, if the tide drops while you’re out there, you might have trouble getting out when you want. You can wade, just make sure to shuffle your feet due to the preponderance of small stingrays, which, coincidentally, can attract very large sharks. Oftentimes, you can fish in the water that’s just a few feet deep off the edges. Look for broken bottom with mixed shells and small grass patches if you can’t get really close in. You never know what you’ll find!
The final type of grass we consider isn’t really grass at all, rather it’s a species of algae. Sargassum weed grows in the open ocean, totally unattached to the ground at all. It floats free in the currents. Sometimes it creates huge mats and often you will see it stretching for miles along a current edge.
Many open-water species will use the patches as temporary refuge but there are also many critters that call the sargassum patches their permanent home — odd little things like sargassum fish, porcupine fish, file fish and others. They are totally unique and there aren’t a lot of other things similar to them. Eels also spawn in the sargassum patches before they go back to freshwaters. Sea turtles feed amongst it, there are various shrimp and crabs.
What this means is that in the middle of the ocean, when you may not be seeing much life around, you find the floating weed patches and you have found plenty to look at and fish to catch.
The most popular species to target here is the mahi-mahi, or dolphinfish. Simply stick a frozen cigar minnow on a jig head using the rigs sold in almost all our coastal tackle shops. This simple setup will produce.
If you have a center-console boat of around 25 feet or so, you can get out there many days during the summer. Check the weather reports, but you’ll probably still get bumped around a bit on the ride home.
Mixed in the with the mahi-mahi, you might all of a sudden hook up with something that tries to eliminate all the line off your reel. That’ll be a wahoo or tuna. Hope you remembered to bring a gaff. The same trolling rigs you use for king mackerel will suffice for this fishing most of the time. If you run into a marlin, then I can’t help you. There are some big ones out there.
Take care of the grass. It will take care of you. It provides homes for millions of small and large marine creatures and shows us obvious spots to start fishing for whichever species we prefer. But it’s also a sign of the quality of our waterways. If they start to disappear, it’s time to start asking some hard questions.
When writer Thomas Mcguane noted, “If the trout are lost, smash the state,” he could easily have included seagrasses. North Carolina waters from Virginia to South Carolina are blessed with a large variety of these ecosystems. We need to take care of them.
