7. How to Read Nature's Signs

Nature, if you know how to read her, is just like an open book. She'll tell you almost anything you want to know. Learn to read her sign language and you'll learn how to tell where the fish ought to be. After that, all you have to do is fish and find out.

Where do you start reading? You start by reading the fishing column in your daily newspaper. The column will tell you, not where the fish are today, but where the fish were yesterday. The chances are good, therefore, they they'll be there today, too. So that's where you want to be. And at the same tide time if possible. After you get there, you start read­ing what nature has to say about your chances of going home with a good catch.

If the signs are wrong, move on to some place where the signs are right. That shouldn't be too far away.

This chapter will try to tell you what signs to look for and what they mean. We'll have to use some words and terms that may be foreign to you now but soon will become part of your fishing vocabulary. We'll start with a simple glossary. Apogee Tide. When the moon is farthest from the earth. Dead Water. When the tide stops for a rest before changing direction.

Drift. The speed with which the tidal current moves. Ebb Tide. The tide on the way out. Falling Barometer. Before a storm. Flooding. The tide on the way in.

Half Tide. Three hours after the tide starts moving in. High Tide. The peak of the incoming tide. High Water Slack. When the incoming tide reaches its peak. Low Tide. The bottom of the outgoing tide. Low Water Slack. When the outgoing tide reaches its lowest. Neap Tide. When the sun, moon and earth are at right angles.

Oceanic Current. The deep sea "roadways" where the water moves in a given channel, such as the Gulf Stream, Cali­fornia Current, Humboldt Current and Florida Current

Offshore Wind. A blow from land to sea*

Onshore Wind. A blow from sea to land.

Perigee Tides. When the moon is closest to the earth.

Rising Barometer. After a storm.

Sea Puss. A gully running at right angles to the beach.

Set. The direction in which the tidal current moves.

Slough. A gully, running parallel to the shore, cut into the bottom by currents swirling past a sandbar.

Spring Tide. When the sun and moon are in a direct line with the earth. This occurs twice a month and has nothing to do with the season of the year.

Tidal Current. Movement of the water caused by the tides; the current that affects inshore and shoreline fishing, the kind of fishing in which this book is mainly concerned.

Tide. The rise and fall of water, caused by the gravity pull of the moon and the sun. The tide surges in twice a day, stops each time for a brief rest, and surges out again.

Tide Cycle. Since the tide changes direction four times a day, it moves roughly in two twelve-hour cycles: six hours in, six hours out; six hours in, six hours out.

Tide Rip. The point at which opposing currents collide.

Tide Time. The moon rises fifty minutes later each day and so the tides turn fifty minutes later each day. That is tide time.

Turn of the Tide. When the changing movement begins. Since you'll be concerned with reading the signs for two different kinds of fishing, let's define them, too, and then talk about them one at a time.

Inshore Fishing. Any fishing within the shelter of land, whether it be bay, inlet, salt marsh, river mouth or tidal estuary.

Shoreline Fishing. Any fishing that's done in the surf, whether from the beach, rocks or jetties. It can also include fishing from a boat one or two hundred yards off the beach.

Reading the Shoreline Signs

You're on the beach, making your debut as the purest of all saltwater fishermen. You're wetting your feet as a surf-caster. What does the seasoned surfcaster do first?

He looks for birds . . . gulls, terns, pelicans, sea pigeons. If they're zooming over the surf, diving and dipping and coming up with small baitfish, that's where you'll want to cast first. Birds feeding from above generally mean game fish feeding from below. The combination drives the baitfish frantic as he tries to escape. A darting, leaping lure is the thing to use.

If no birds are working, read the waves. Is there a line of breakers offshore and another line of breakers inshore? Prob­ably there's a sandbar in between with a deep, fast-running slough on the inshore edge of the bar. Lay your hook be­tween the two rows of breakers, into that slough.

Live bait and sinker to hold bottom are best there, because baitfish are forced into such channels and they try to get out. They take the easiest way out. They stay near bottom and ride the current. Stripers probably are lurking at the tail end of the slough, waiting for the baitfish to wash by and be gobbled.

Is there a spot where there's unusual surface agitation and small, sharp and swift streaks of light? Those glints probably are baitfish kicking up the surface as stripers—or any other surf gamester, for that matter—attack them from below. Again the frantic lure that resembles the baitfish.

The color of the water will tell you a lot. Light color means shallow water. A light strip running roughly parallel to the beach also is the sign of a sandbar. If the tide is high, fish may be feeding right on top of the bar because then there's enough moving water to stir up the sand and root out the worms and shellfish. Bait up with worm or shellfish and fish the top of that bar.

At low or ebbing tide, fish the darker water inside the bar. Dark water means deep water. That means the slough. If there is no dark inshore water, the bar probably extends right on up to the beach and the slough is on the seaward side.

In an inshore slough, natural bait is best. In a seaward slough either natural bait or a metal squid will take fish. If you use bait in the seaward slough, let your hook sink to. the bottom and rest awhile. A fish finder rig is good here. After a minute or so, reel in about ten feet of line and rest again. Then another ten feet and another rest. Up the side of the slough, across the top of the bar, stopping along the way to let the fish-finder do its job. If you use a metal lure, cast onto the bar and retrieve slowly, jerking the squid slightly as you go-It might be as much as fifty yards wide or as little as twenty-five feet wide, but if there is a strip of dark water extending out from the beach it's a sea puss. Cast as far into it as you can, either natural bait or artificial lure, and then follow the gully back home.

A patch of dark, comparatively calm water means a hole. A hole means a place for natural bait to hide on the bottom. Put your bait in that hole. If the surface water over the hole isn't too calm but is eddying or whirling, try a hire on the top. An eddy or a whirlpool can tell you where a hole is even if the color of the water can't.

Is there a patch of white water kicking up and making a fuss? That's probably a tide rip and the colliding currents are rooting the worms and shellfish out of the sand. This situation calls for natural bait and sinker.

Striped bass being contrary critters, there is no set time for fishing for them that any surfcaster can honestly call best. But this every Sultan of the Surf does know: stripers feed on worms, crabs, clams, mussels and anything that lives in the sand. A turning tide creates wave action and currents that rip up the bottom and root out the sand borers. So the game­sters will be in the surf with every turn of the tide, hungry and come to eat.

The low tide line is one spot where the surf churns up the bottom, the high tide line is another spot Where the surf tears up the sand. Some, therefore, say fish the last two hours of an outgoing tide and the first two hours of an incoming tide. Others say fish the last two hours of an incoming tide and the first two hours of an outgoing tide.

And both schools of thought have long strings of fish to back them up. The answer is obvious: if the signs are favor­able, they're both right.

There are these other factors to be taken into consideration, too:

A strong offshore wind will calm down the water. Striped bass don't like calm water. Speaking comparatively, channel bass and bluefish do.

A strong onshore wind may make surfcasting impossible.

Surf fish don't like a lot of seaweed in the water. Nor do they like dirty, brown, roiled-up water.

A storm is a good time for stripers . . .if the water is clean and if the angler can cast into the strong wind—and if he's rugged enough to face a high sea and raging, towering surf.

Reading the Inshore Signs

Game fish don't really follow the tides. They follow the baitfish and it is the baitfish that follow the tide. They do it for two reasons: because its pull is too strong for them and they have no choice, and they have the misguided notion that a changing tide will let them scurry off to a safe haven that the gamesters can't get to.

So on an incoming tide they don't only scurry for the shore. They scoot into any inlet that will take them from open ocean to inshore hiding place. The surf fish know this and they get to the inlet first and sit and wait. They'll generally lurk on the inshore end of the gateway on a flooding tide. That's the place for your hook to be. The ocean end of the gateway is the spot to fish on an ebbing tide.

Inside the inlets, the signs you seek are basically the same. Tide rips, dark water, eddies and whirlpools. Here the rips and eddies will be easier to spot because they'll occur mostly at the junction of two watery thoroughfares—canals, rivers, creeks and such.

But the tidal changes will be more pronounced inshore than in the surf and so there are other signs to look for. Sod banks—the sides of salt marsh thoroughfares—that are high and muddy-dry at low tide are below the surface at high tide. The water surging against the banks roots out shrimp, crab, plant life and bug life.

Naturally, then, a sod bank at a flooding tide is a fine place to fish.

Most inshore fish are bottom feeders so it is important to know what signs to look for on the bottom, too.

Bottom fish are, generally speaking, sedentary creatures who prefer to ride the tidal currents in quest of food rather than forage with the fierceness that marks the surf fish.

Follow the set of the tide and you'll follow the bottom feeder. Once you get your boat-drifting down to a fine tech­nique, you'll be able to cover an entire bay in six hours— moving up with the last three hours of a flooding tide, moving down with the first three hours of an ebbing tide—and stay with the bottom feeders every moment of the time.

Bays have their deeper channels—recognized by darker water—and channels have their ledge like sides. Bait seeks the shelter of the ledges, only to find there is no shelter because the game fish have gathered there for a feast. So you fish those ledges.

The bottom can be sandy or muddy, rocky or coral-covered. The Croaker family likes the sand, the Fluke and Flounder family thrive in both sand and mud. The Groupers are at home among the rocks. The Grunt family likes coral.

In about six to eight feet of water, scoop up a little of the bottom. You can use a pole, a rake, your anchor—anything that will give you enough soil to tell whether it's mud or sand. If your probing instrument hits the bottom hard, it's rock. The color of the water will tell you if it's coral.

Sand is sand, coral is coral and rock is rock. But there are different kinds of mud. Slimy, greasy mud is no good. If it smells bad—you won't have to put your nose to it to tell— and if it has a gray tint it is no good.

Clean mud feels like velvet and is black. The odor, if any, isn't Chanel No. 5 but it isn't disagreeable. Are there small white flecks interlacing the black? Those flecks are tiny, al­most microscopic shellfish and shellfish is bait and bait is food and food means a feeding ground for fish.

Not all the inshore fishing signs were posted by nature. Man contributed his share. Piers, bridges, railroad trestles, causeways, bulkheads, buoys. Every structure that man ever built over water has to have its footing underwater. Barnacles, weed, mussels—all forms of small marine life—cling to the pilings, the under footing. They are beacons for the smaller fish to come to dinner. And small fish is bait for the larger fish you're after.

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