Let’s start with the most popular baits among bay area live-bait aficionados, and finish with some of the more esoteric or less-commonly-used varieties.

Whitebait

I’ve heard people call strips of squid whitebait, but that’s just not what whitebait is. What most (perhaps not all, but most) of us call whitebait are Pilchards – a hardy bait that has distinct, hard, and not-easy-to-remove scales. They’re often called Scaled Sardines.

It’s Shad I’m After

Planning a nighttime Tarpon trip recently, I posted a question on one of CapMel.com’s message boards to see if I could get any frozen menhaden anywhere in Tampa. I know where I can buy them in St. Pete, but not on the north side of the bay. I was after something special here; something not easy to find, not easy to net, and near impossible to keep alive for any period of time. Not that that matters, though; Tarpon just love them dead; I’ve seen them produce while healthy threadfins splashed around like so many aquatic ballet dancers drawing no attention at all.

If you’ve ever used shad for Tarpon, you probably know more about bait than I do. But if you don’t, or you aren’t sure what they are, then perhaps it’s time to take a brief refresher about the baitfish available around the west coast of Florida – specifically in the Tampa Bay area.

Many of the baits we’re going to talk about are fished live; but two in particular are most often fished dead – one being the shad I mentioned and the other the ballyhoo. There’s no reason, though, that popular live baits can’t be frozen and used later. Many species, such as redfish, Tarpon, and trout, are often taken on frozen baits. And what better frozen bait to use then something that’s on the menu when it’s alive?

Let’s start with the most popular baits among bay area live-bait aficionados, and finish with some of the more esoteric or less-commonly-used varieties.

Whitebait

I’ve heard people call strips of squid whitebait, but that’s just not what whitebait is. What most (perhaps not all, but most) of us call whitebait are Pilchards – a hardy bait that has distinct, hard, and not-easy-to-remove scales. They’re often called Scaled
 

Sardines.

Whitebait travel in schools. Although you can find them in winter, they’re well-hidden and difficult to locate. For the most part, they start to show up en mass when water temps hit around 73° or so and disappear when it goes below that in the fall. In late March, guides (and serious amateurs) are finding them mostly just outside and inside the Skyway Bridge. As the water warms further, they start to show up on the flats, eventually can be found all the way to the furthest reaches of the north bay near and above Safety Harbor.

The best baits are about 4 or 5 inches long. Smaller than that and they get “gilled”, or stuck in the net at their gill plates.  And bigger than that and they’re a little unwieldy for average-sized fish (but wonderful if you’re seeking a trophy or larger fish - because big baits attract big fish).

When they’re on the flats, whitebaits are much easier to net – and net them you must if you want to collect enough for a day of fishing. Slowly and carefully look around the flats until you see silver flashing in the water. High-diving pelicans working an area alone or in small groups are also a great indicator that there’s whitebait around. So too are cormorants. If the pelicans are sort of spinning in a low arc, instead of getting up in the air and dropping into the water head-first, and there are seagulls sitting on their heads (we’re not kidding), then they’re feeding on anchovies (glass minnows) and not sardines.

When you do find them, anchor up, start tossing small chunks of a chum mixture (made of one-half bag of corn meal, one can of Jack Mackerel, and optionally a couple of “glurps” out of a bottle of Menhaden oil.) Then throw a cast net on the chummed up baits (how to do that is outside the scope of this article; find someone to teach you how). We mix the chum in large Ziploc freezer bags, and take the whole bag out with us. This stuff stinks bad – especially if you use the menhaden oil – so do be careful and keep it away from your better half and out of the snack drawer in your refrigerator.

Many fishermen actually use whitebait as chum for target species – a method popularized in the early seventies by Boca Grande legend Captain Scott Moore. You squeeze a few and throw them into likely, fishy-looking spots, and many times the injured baits will draw boiling, angry strikes. Put one in the same spot with a hook through the cartilage just above his nose, and you’ll often draw an immediate strike. Don’t throw too many freebies, though, because you can turn off the bite by over-feeding the fish.

Whitebait is best fished on a rig with no hardware (as are most baits). Use a surgeon’s knot (click here to see how to tie one) to attach a leader to your line, and loop knot (click here to see how to tie a loop knot) to tie on the hook. If you ever do need weight, use a split shot (keep them in several weight sizes; they work best when there’s only one on the line). And remember, rigs with swivels, bells, sinkers, three-way swivels, and other junk make the bait less effective.

Everything that swims in the bay and is targeted by sport fishermen will eat whitebait. With the exception of a single instance where Mel Berman and the late Merrill Chandler (known to many of you as Canoeman) totally embarrassed me and Captain Mike Plastic by absolutely dominating us in a “bait vs lures” competition, when they rarely fail to attract something. However, if you’re looking for Snook or Redfish, having a well full of whitebait dramatically improves your chances. My wife Ellen once caught a 125lb tarpon on a 5 inch whitebait while fishing for Snook with 6 lb spinning gear.

Now, lets take a look at some of the locally available baits:

Threadfins

Often confused with Whitebait, and even called whitebait by some number of experienced fishermen (and ladies), threadfins are very different from the scaled sardines we just described. In fact, they’re in a different family, being herring, not sardines. They sport a long, thin extension of their dorsal fin that reaches nearly to their tails.
The first big difference between threadfin and whitebait is that they don’t come to chum -- hence they’re considerably harder to get them in a net. Beside the fact that they eat plankton and not cornmeal and mashed-up fish, they tend to run in deep water, often being found near channel markers, around bridge pilings, and just schooling in deep, open water.

Netting bait in deep water presents a challenge; most of us actually carry two different nets – one with a fine mesh to avoid gilling whitebait on the flats, and a heavier one with wider mesh that sinks fast and improves our chances of successfully netting bait in deep water. Fortunately, though, you can also catch threadfins on a Sabiki – a pre-tied rig available at most tackle stores that sport six or more tiny gold hooks with a piece of plastic wrapped around them. You put a weight on the bottom of the rig, and cast it into a school of threads, jerking and reeling as you retrieve. You can often catch six at a time – but be careful of the hooks. They’re tiny and stick into anything they touch, including you. By the way, you can catch whitebait on Sabikis, too, but why bother if your nickname is “Silver Dollar”?

You can see threads easily if you know what to look for. For some unknown reason, they seem to jump in patterns, creating the appearance of rain sweeping across a small stretch of water. This patterned jumping seems to be behavioral, in that it’s much different than what they do when something is about to eat them, or when ravenous predators are scattering their torn remains around as they die a horrid, slashing death. When you know the baits well, you can definitely tell the difference between patterned jumping and escape attempts. Drive over the Howard Frankland or the Causeway on hot July day, and you’ll see them doing their thing on the slick, windless surface in mid-sized schools scattered all over the bay.

They’re very cautious and hence spooked very easily, so if you’re going to catch them on sabiki rigs, determine which way the school is moving (not hard to if you watch for a few minutes from 50 or 75 yards away) and determine the wind’s strength and direction. Position your boat so the movement of the school and the wind-drift lets you get close with the motor turned off. Move close even with a trolling motor and they’re gone, sounding at the slightest disturbance.

Live Threadfins are often the bait of choice for Tarpon, and slow-trolled work wonders on Kingfish as well. Smaller ones (they run twice the size of whitebait as a rule) work well on reds, trout, and snook -- but perhaps not quite as well as whitebait. Threads not as hardy as scaled – and sardines need great circulation in a livewall to survive a few hours. Also. they die quicker on the hook. For Tarpon, though, they’re hard to beat, with the possible exception of dead, stinky shad.

Shad

Shad are really menhaden – but are also called “pogies”  -- and up north moss-bunkers. Shad are one of the world’s most sought-after species of fish, believe it or not. Although you can find them in the bay, they’re hard to target, hard to find, and – being a deep, open water baitfish – hard to net. They don’t come to chum nor do they stupidly attack Sabikis. The best and most reliable way to use shad is to buy them frozen, then thaw them out and fish them these baits dead – right on the bottom.

Live shad are often hosts to weird, creepy, alien-looking entities that live in their mouths. If you have live shad in your bait well, you’ll find these things in the bottom when you clean it out. They look for all the world just like the thing that burst from the chest of the scientist in that movie Alien. Like we said -- very weird and very, very creepy.

Menhaden are sought by large-scale commercial netters because of their incredibly high oil content. They’re squeezed for fish oil, fertilizers, and other stuff that benefits from smelling fishy, and the dried remains are crushed up and the resultant “meal” used as a component in many animal feeds. These fish get quite large – 3 to 5 lbs – and are often tied in the bottom of crab traps up north to attract blue crabs. Again, they stink, and for certain species, being stinky is a good thing.

Tarpon love dead shad on the bottom, and having shad improves the chances that you’ll get to jump a fish. I guess shad would work for reds as well, but why bother when you can catch reds on just about anything else when they’re eating. Using shad requires dedication, focus, and an obsession to wrestle tarpon to get past the smell. Besides all that, it’s hard to even find them frozen. (Many locals stores, Like Tampa Fishing Outfitters at 3916 Osborne Ave, in Tampa, carry frozen shad.)

Spanish Sardines

Once you load a net with them, you’ll never forget what Spanish sardine look like when they come out of the water. They’re almost iridescent, flashing blue and silver and looking for all the world like they’re lit from within. Just before they die, that is – which is usually just about the time you’re emptying the net into your live well.

Spanish sardines are the ones we eat with oil, spring water or (pardon my French,) but yuuuuk --mustard. Packed tightly in their little can of death, they look bad but taste really good (if you like them, that is). They also populate the bay, although I’ve only really seen them in mass close inside or outside the Skyway bridges. I’ve had them come up near the clam bar just north of the skyway, mixing in with good old whitebait.

Spanish sardines work well as dead bait works, and pretty much for the same species as any dead bait – redfish, black drum, and unfortunately catfish. You can buy them frozen in 20 pound blocks, and offshore anglers often bring them along if they don’t have live bait – or even if they do, because sometimes the grouper eat them as dead bait quicker than they do live ones. We don’t really know why that is, it just is. Unless Another highly productive bait – fresh or frozen – is cigar Minnows. They probably get that name because of their shape, which is fat and long like a stogie.

Glass Minnows

I’ve never seen these things used for bait except in Cayman Brac, where a guide named Eddie Money driving a 68 Nash Rambler with no floor boards used them to put me on incredible schools of bonefish by pinching off pieces of a frozen block of Glass Minnows (bay anchovies) and tossing it so close to my feet that I thought he was nuts. They were frozen in a block because their average size is an inch-and-a-half. Way too small to actually use on a hook.

Well, turns out he was nuts, but not about getting bonefish so close to my feet that I could hardly see them because they were so very obvious. I can hear him now “Yo Brudda! Look at da boan fish mon! Dey’re rhight dere mon!. Just before he ran out of the water and said “Watch for da barracooda mon! One just bit da leg from a white mon on toosday last mon!”

Funny and sad -- but true. Glass minnows often fool people hunting for whitebait because pelicans love glass minnows. When they’re feeding on these tiny, little, useless-for-all-but bonefish in the Cayman Islands baitfish, they make short, close-to-the-water little turns and fall back into the water. Seagulls eat from the same table, and often stop to rest on Pete’s head. Watch pelicans feeding and eventually you will be able to determine this phenomena. I swear.

They travel in (for them) fairly large schools, and their eating behavior (they eat plankton on the surface) results in little dimples that look like light rain – resulting in the often used term “rain minnows.”. Oh – one other thing about glass minnows; I hate them on Pizzas, where they go by the name anchovy.

Pinfish

Pinfish are in the porgy family – a hugely popular and sought-after food fish normally associated with cold, deep water. In fact, most of the pinfish we see in the Bay area are really babies, and when they grow up and head offshore, a five pounder isn’t uncommon.

I’ve actually taken big ones – which inshore are roughly the size of a bluegill – and fried them. Yummy. Fortunately for us, Redfish also find them highly desirable as table fare. And they smack them like chocolate candy. Fish them under a cork for reds, or fish them on the bottom for grouper, or throw them at cruising cobia for a real treat. They’re great baits, very hard on the fingers (they don’t call them Pinfish for nothing) and relatively easy to catch using Sabikis with small pieces of shrimp attached to the tiny gold hooks. They also live longer than parrots. I remember when a friend of mine found a little one alive in the bottom of the plastic cap of a soda bottle – where he had been laying sideways in about 1/4 inch of water.

They’re bigger under docks and near bridges then they are on the flats, where they congregate in great numbers around June -- when they breed. When you do seek them out, try to match the size of the bait to the dimensions of the fish you’re targeting. We usually like them about the same size as whitebait, maybe four or five inches long.

My friend Captain Mike Plastic, now having altogether too much fun in Panama, used to say he liked to “give em a haircut”, or trim their pointy dorsal fins with clippers. He felt it not only made them act weird, thereby improving their fish-attracting power, but that when a fish did approach them, it made them easier to swallow, so to speak.

Ballyhoo

Called Bayhoo when they live here, ballyhoo are probably the world’s most popular baitfish, since offshore guides use them to catch anything from Marlin to Tuna to Sailfish to Wahoo – you name it. This is largely attributable to the fact that their shape – when properly rigged for trolling – allows them to be dragged faster through the water than most live baits. And faster trolling speeds more often result in strikes for some species – especially the pelagics. Also, ballyhoo freeze well, last a long time on the hook, and stink. Again, a good thing.

I had always seen ballyhoo in the keys, but never in Tampa Bay until about six or seven years ago – after the net ban took effect. The first time I saw ballyhoo in the water I was standing on the bow of my boat with a friend, Eddie Willie Spencer, running the boat while I “gunned” the net. I saw their red tails and throats – a sure give-away – and said to Eddie Willie (and Mike Plastic, ever-present) “I just saw a school of ballyhoo”. “You’re drunk” they replied (which, at the time, I very well might have been) but a quick toss of the ten-footer proved me right, with three wiggly little “hoo” in the net.

You can chum them if you put some anise oil in your chum, and they seem to be present most of the time now when we find whitebait – albeit in much smaller numbers, traveling as they do in schools of ten to twenty baits. Ballyhoo are almost irresistible to Spanish Mackerel, Kingfish, and even (dead and cut into chunks) for redfish, grouper, or anything else that eats dead bait.

Don’t confuse them with needlefish, though – these similar-looking but different fish also show up on the flats at the same time. Ballyhoo don’t have teeth, and they don’t have an upper jaw – only a long lower jaw. Needlefish have two equal-sized jaws, and both have nasty teeth. Both make good baits, but ballyhoo are the more equal of the two.

So Where Do I Buy Them?

You can buy some of these baits frozen, and some of them you have to catch yourself. For the most part, bait you catch is better than bait you buy – although having some jumbo or select shrimp in the well improves your chances of catching fish even when you can find live whitebait. Snook, in particular, sometimes prefer shrimp – even if there are whitebait all around. Ditto reds, which love shrimp dead or alive.

Learning how to catch bait, particularly using a cast net (the most effective way bar none) is something that needs to be shown, and if I can figure out a way to show you how using only words, I’ll get rich. Otherwise, find a friend who knows how and promise to take them fishing if they’ll only show you their secret. There are many different ways to throw a net, but learning one well and practicing it until you can do it in choppy water and a strong wind in your face will surely serve you well. (Also, see http://calusa.com/howtothrow.cfm for some instructions.)

Good fishing, tight lines, and be sure to say hi if you see me in a Robalo named Skidder. I’m out there often.

Gary Poyssick.