Crash the creeks.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Fishing inshore is all about water temperature. Cold weather pushes species such as speckled trout into the creekmouths or onto deeper flats, while warm spells encourage them to cruise grassflats like they do during the summer. Northwest anglers may be required to do some searching to find fish.

The area between the St. Marks River and Rock Island below the Econfina River is a great place to look for redfish and trout. They poke around marsh grass and oyster bars for minnows, shrimp and small crabs, especially on an incoming tide. A good strategy is to find a channel leading to a creek from the flats and fish with the incoming tide up to the creekmouth. Beaded and popping floats with jigs or shrimp work well for locating trout. So do jerkbaits and suspending plugs. Reds typically want jigs fished near the bottom in the channels. Gold spoons and jerkbaits seem to work better when fished in the creek-mouths around oyster bars and up along the marsh grass.

Getting trout and reds to bite is usually not difficult; finding them is often the greater challenge. Hopping from creek to creek is a common strategy for finding fish. The other option is to anchor or stake out in one spot and fish through a tide change. The idea is that sooner or later the fish will show up. This takes considerably more patience but it's a great way to learn the best times to fish each creek.

Some creeks turn on when the tide falls. Baitfish, crabs and shrimp flush out with the flow, becoming a food conveyor for waiting gamefish. Trout and especially redfish lurk near the bottom and wait for schools of mullet or crabs to pass overhead. Jerkbaits, plugs, streamers and poppers are effective when cast up in the creek and retrieved out with the flow. The only downside to fishing on a falling tide is the risk of getting stranded at low tide. Some creeks have deep channels even at low tide, while others require an extremely shallow-draft boat or at least one light enough to be dragged a long way.

Grouper fishing is good this month, especially in shallow water where the water is cooling down. Many anglers swear by the notion that grouper completely abandon the shallows when the water heats up. Avid divers indicate that they see plenty of grouper inshore during the warmer months but they are just more scattered. During the cooler months, they congregate in larger numbers. Water as shallow as 12 feet out of St. Marks often produces hefty grouper. Most anglers headed offshore pass over these small spots.

Some anglers simply troll to cover a lot of water until they find good grouper spots. Large plugs, spoons, or live bait can all be productive. Along the way, other species such as kingfish and cobia often turn up, especially when trolling in deeper water. Fishermen can also troll around the numerous, well-marked artificial reefs scattered along the coast. Grouper, cobia, kingfish, jacks and rockfish are just a few of the possible catches around these reefs. They're also good for flounder fishing, preferably with live mud minnows or finger mullet fished near the bottom. Small jigs tipped with fresh shrimp are also productive.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Anglers looking for larger fish can head out of Mexico Beach to the Cape Shoals Buoy which is about 30 miles out. Large pods of bait attract kings and wahoo to the area. Cigar minnows and hardtails are deadly when freelined around schools of bait. Out of Apalachicola, anglers can hook up with amberjack, kings, grouper and snapper around the Empire Mica wreck.

Sheepshead should definitely be on the agenda if fishing Apalachicola Bay. Almost any structure in Apalachicola Bay holds sheepshead, but they don't really turn on until cooler weather arrives.

While they are famous for their bait stealing habits, they can be outwitted. Chum makes them stupid. Put some scent in the water and sheepshead caution goes out the window. Ground shrimp, oysters, crabs or even crawfish work well, but barnacles seem to be the best. Otherwise, they will either steal bait or sulk.

Current flow also seems to stimulate sheepshead feeding, especially around the bridges that span the bay. Bridge pilings and markers that have barnacles growing on them usually have sheepshead in attendance. Anglers often use a shovel or flattened hoe to scrape barnacles into the water, just before dropping hooks baited with live or fresh shrimp to the bottom. If the bait is moving with the current, it reduces the amount of time the fish have to scrutinize and wrangle the bait off the hook. With all the scent in the water they usually gobble the bait, hook and all.

Lake Talquin and Lake Seminole have large numbers of stripers that get active this month. Watch for surface feeding when they attack schools of shad in open water. They can be caught with casting and jigging spoons if they can be reached during the feeding forays. After the feeding frenzy, try deep-jigging in nearby staging areas that typically have structure. This might be downed timber, brush or stump fields.

Best Bet NORTHWEST

Large reservoirs such as Lake Talquin are great places to find speckled perch during the cooler months. Because reservoirs flood large areas of timber, they create fantastic habitat for species such as crappie. Numerous brushpiles on Lake Talquin, usually marked with FWC buoys, hold both crappie and bass.

Trolling is one of the most active ways to find concentrations offish. Fish small, colored jigs at different depths to locate them. Sometimes switching to tuffy or Missouri minnows after a school is located is a more effective way to catch them around structure.