January 2, 2008- Orange Beach, AL
During the late-fall and winter, charter boat captain Dennis Treigle will often fish for redfish in open water just off the beach in Orange Beach. After cold fronts move through south Alabama, Treigle says it’s usually not difficult to locate schools of redfish within a quarter mile of the beach. “And once you find them, they are lots of fun to catch,” he says.
Capt. Dennis Treigle with a Bull Red Catch
The largest redfish, often called bull reds, are legendary fighters that will sometimes snap the best fishing lines and strip gears in the finest reels. Bull reds weigh between 25 and 40 pounds, have
an attitude, and fight all the way to the fish box. Pound for pound, few fish fight like redfish.
”When a cold front moves through and you get a north wind for a day or two, the redfish move near shore,” said Treigle, who runs his
Find Me Fishin' charter boat out of Zeke’s Marina. “These fish go there to breed -- that’s their purpose when they’re here within a few hundred yards of the beach. As soon as the first good cold front moves through here, big schools of redfish start showing up.”
In the 1980s, large schools of spawning adults were overharvested to meet growing demand from restaurants for blackened redfish. Fearing that brood stock levels would be adversely affected by uncontrolled harvest, federal and state authorities set limits on tonnage along the Gulf Coast. Every Gulf state but Mississippi designated the redfish a game fish, banned commercial harvests, and set recreational catch limits. Gulf States have also invested in stocking programs in which millions of juvenile, hatchery-raised reds have been released.
Now, 20 years after redfish were protected, their numbers have grown in many areas along the Gulf Coast. Reds are found in abundance along coastline in Florida Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.
Captain Maurice “Fitz” Fitzsimmons, who manages the charter fishing fleet at
Zeke’s
Landing Marina, says redfish have been “really thick” around Perdido Pass this November and December. “Within about a quarter mile of the beach and going east and west two or three miles, there have been a lot of 25 and 30 pound bull reds caught. One of the biggest secrets in Orange Beach is the amount of redfish near the Pass at this time of year,” Fitzsimmons said.
It is near
Perdido Pass that Treigle begins his searches for
redfish.
“When you’re fishing for reds
Pelicans & Seagulls feeding on minnows
pushed to
the surface by Bull Reds.
in the Gulf, they’re
just like tuna and sailfish in that they work a ‘ball of bait’, Treigle
said. “Tuna get under a school of sardines or cigar minnows and they
push them to the surface, working them into a ball. It’s the same thing
with the red fish. The reds get underneath rainbow minnows or blood minnows
– these minnows are really small but there are millions of them –
and push them to the surface, feeding through them. Then the birds find the minnows and
start feeding on them from above. When you find a big group of pelicans
and seagulls working –
that’s really what you’re looking for.”
Occasionally, sharks will feed on the school of redfish as they drive the “ball of bait” to the surface, providing opportunities to catch mako, Treigle says. Two Orange Beach charter boat captains caught a
609-pound mako in December while fishing for redfish near the Pass, he noted. Wade Weidenbach and Scotty Bowman hooked the mako on a Van Stahl spinning rod set as a king mackerel rig equipped with 40 pound test line. The two captains reported seeing about “an acre” of redfish rise to the surface just before they saw
the shark’s fin.
Still, some uncertainty exists about the size and condition of redfish
stocks in the Gulf. President George W. Bush signed an
Executive Order
in October 2007 that designated the red drum, or redfish, a protected
game fish. This prohibits the sale of red fish caught in federal waters
and encourages all states to consider designating red fish as a
protected game fish within state waters. “Unfortunately, the red drum
species is still trying to recover,” the president said when he signed
the Order. “That's why I'm going to take this
Nikki, apts. Scotty & Wade with 609 lb mako.
Click hereto read more about this catch.
additional step today, because the
recovery is not complete. In the waters from North Carolina to the tip of Florida, the numbers are still too low. And in parts of our Gulf, we're not sure of their status. So if you're not sure of the status, we ought to be taking special precaution.”
Claude Peteet Mariculture Center in
Gulf Shores
Jay Gunn, who for more than 20 years has worked at the
Claude
Peteet Mariculture Center in Gulf Shores, recalls a study of redfish
conducted at the state-run facility that involved the release of about
100,000 juvenile redfish from 1992 through 1995. Gunn said young redfish
between 6” and 8” long were hatchery-raised, tagged and released in
waters around Mobile Bay. “From the redfish we put out, we had quite a
few tag returns,” Gunn said. “We learned that very few fish left the
area – almost all of them stayed around the bays and bayous in Alabama.
The other thing we learned is that the fish didn’t go offshore until
they were 24” to 27”.
Treigle probably catches some of those redfish or their descendants when he fishes now. What he knows for certain is that big schools of redfish are often visible from his charter boat after cold air moves into Orange Beach. “We saw the birds working today, but didn’t see the fish,” he said. “Then as soon as we hooked a couple of them the entire school rose to the top. So there were about 300 giant bull reds swimming around the boat.”
Treigle said he usually releases the redfish he catches, but some of his customers will keep one or two to eat. The catch limit for redfish in Alabama is three. The fish must all be over 16”, but only one red may be kept that is larger than 26”, he said.
When the redfish start biting...
When fishing for redfish in the Gulf, Treigle says
he likes to use tackle that will allow him to get the fish to the boat
in about five minutes. “I like to use 50-pound braid, a rod that’s
classed from 15 pounds to 30 pounds, and a decent-sized reel,” he said.
If you use lighter tackle you fight them longer, they expend their
energy a lot more, they wear themselves down, and if the sharks are
there you’re going to get bit off lots of the time.
We don’t want that to happen; we want to get the fish to the boat, take
a picture and get them back into the water as quick as we
possibly can so that they have a good chance of survival.”
