Doughtie: Redfish are fine, but consider the snaggle-tooth spotted sea trout + tips

Whenever people ask me to help them figure out how to fish our waters, one fish rises to the top of their bucket list like cream on milk.

Redfish.

Don't get me wrong, redfish are a blast to catch and if I had to guess how many I have caught in my lifetime it would easily be in the thousands, maybe even 10,000.

Maybe it's for this reason that during the fall and winter months I prefer fishing for a different species: the snaggle-toothed spotted sea trout.

While redfish are powerful and give you a run for your money on light tackle, trout are more of a finesse fish.

Beautifully streamlined with only two goofy-looking front teeth, there is just something about these fish that makes me try to convince whomever I am fishing with to target trout instead of redfish. I guess I should emphasize "try to convince," because most of the time I lose the battle and end up going after reds.

Personally, I have not killed nor eaten a redfish in years. But give me a couple of trout fillets caught that very same day, pan sautèed and lightly breaded, and I am in hog heaven.

Other than triggerfish, I never freeze fish. Trout in particular tend to get mushy if frozen, so even if I catch 30 or 40, I release all of them except what I might have that same night.

I think my love for trout fishing goes way back to my early teens. My dad and I would get up early and -- using old school lures like grubs, Mirror Lures and the infamous Christmas Tree lure -- we would catch so many trout you could easily fill a wash tub.

I am not exaggerating: Every single cast was rewarded with a fish. Growing up in Sea Pines on Hilton Head, the hot spots were in Baynard Cove, and when they dug out the Harbour Town Yacht Basin, it became trout city.

Not only would you catch trout after trout, redfish were in the mix too, as were those bizarre-looking, bright silver cutlass fish, often called ribbon fish.

Another reason I developed such a love for trout fishing at that early age was you didn't need live bait. I can't tell you how many times I wiped out on my bicycle as I tried to balance a Styrofoam cooler full of water and live shrimp on my handlebars.

Usually when that happened, I would be halfway to the spot I planned to fish and, besides taking all the skin off my knees or elbows, I would be lying there on the concrete in the middle of chunks of Styrofoam while my precious shrimp flipped around me. Talk about a helpless feeling.

A whole lot has changed around here since then, but it appears there are still bunches of trout to be had. Some of the old-school techniques like Christmas Tree lures have gone by the wayside. But overall, the techniques I used 30 years ago still produce some mighty fine trout.

Want some hints?

Seeing that it's the Christmas season, I'm feeling chartable, so here you go.

With the water getting clear, take that braided line of your reel and replace it with 8-pound test monofilament. With trout having only two front teeth, you don't even need a leader. My favorite artificial lures are DOA shrimp (natural color), ZMan scented PaddleZ (sexy mullet color) and of course screwtails that are either chartreuse or clear, both with glitter in them.

As for jig heads for all these tails, I like use 1/8-ounce heads that are white or red. As for tides, definitely incoming from half tide to high tide.

You know the saying "Presentation is everything?" That is particularly true when trout fishing. Keep your rod tip low to the water and it's all in the wrist, not the arm. As the lure sinks, twitch it using only your wrist, then retrieve it slow and steady with a wrist twitch every three or four revolutions of the reel.

Then, when you feel a trout bite, don't try and jerk their face off, but simply reel faster and faster and you'll have them every time.

If you want to fish with a cork, use a large Cajun Thunder (red is best) with about 2 feet of 8-pound test mono tied to a DOA shrimp and float it along the grass using that same wrist twitch so the bobber clicks.

So there you go: Trout 101. If you do get into them, keep just what you'll eat while they are fresh and release the rest. If you get these techniques down, you should to catch them every time.

This story was originally published December 28, 2015 at 12:18 PM with the headline "Doughtie: Redfish are fine, but consider the snaggle-tooth spotted sea trout + tips."