Capt. George Tunison

With many snook heading east away from the beaches and now working the bushes, points, docks and oyster bars, plus good numbers of fall redfish competing for the same cover, folks that enjoy inshore lure and fly casting cover have lots of hungry targets to try and fool.

There are several things that make a Southwest Florida inshore angler successful, like a good understanding of the tides and how weather affects them and the fish, seasonal fish location and appropriate lure selections, quiet boat management skills and accurate casting. Mastering freshwater bass techniques, like pitching and, to a lesser extent, flipping, to the most important one of all, skipping, which automatically puts you light years ahead of the don’t-want-to-get-hung-up “edge angler.”

Novice anglers don’t realize that huge fish hunt, hug and rest right on the very edge of the shore often belly to the bottom, way back and under the lure-snagging stuff. Ever cast a great looking shoreline spot with no luck and then get hung up? You motor in with the electric and as soon as you touch the bushes or the sand, a jumbo snook or fat red suddenly rockets out past the boat. These are the fish Mr. Edge Angler never gets a shot at but Mr. Skip Master definitely will.

Learning to pitch a lure or bait to the edge of cover or to accurately pick apart open cover like the whole length of a blown down tree, pitching is a fine technique. Learning to make a quiet near splash-less entry ups your game even further, but if the fish are 10-15 feet back under the unforgiving mangroves and there’s only 6-8 inches of open space below the branches, then skipping is the only way to see if they want to play. Skipping or skip casting not only gets you in fishy territory but it can also provoke reaction strikes from neutral or negative fish.

The angler can skip lures with a bass-style bait-casting reel, spinning reel or fly rods. Once again, let’s look at the basic technique, which is, of course, based on skipping a flat stone low across the water’s surface.

Open the bail of your spinning reel and pin the line to the spool with your index finger. Hold the rod tip down to the surface at your side, and with the rod slightly behind you, bring it sharply forward keeping the tip inches from the water’s surface the whole cast. Release the line on the end of the forward movement, and if you’re timing is right the lure should jet forward and skip low across the surface. If you smash the lure into the water two feet in front of you and it sinks, that simply means your timing is wrong. Stand on the dock, the shoreline, boat or home pool and practice.

Now that you got that, let’s take it up another notch. This time instead of a flat forward sidearm cast, try holding the rod down again to your side and pointed at the water. Then in one motion lift the rod a couple of feet or so and quickly make a clockwise circle with the lure hanging from the leader before bringing the rod forward and letting go of the line, causing the lure to shoot forward. What the extra step does is to load the rod giving the lure extra speed and better skipping performance.

Good skippers can skip forward and back handed with both hands. A perfect “skip” won’t really hop and skip but rather glide over the water’s surface creating a mini-rooster tail along its surface path as it jets along 20 feet back under that dock.

Fortunately, if this is as clear as mud, simply turn on YouTube and learn from the many pro bass anglers putting lures far back under tight structure usually with bait-casting reels and educated thumbs.

Capt. George Tunison is a Cape Coral resident fishing guide. You can contact him at 239-282-9434 or via email at captgeorget3@aol.com.